The development of Short-Form Five Factor Personality Inventory

Objective: Five Factor Personality Inventory, when used in large samples for screening purposes may lead to difficulties and unhealthy results because of its length. The inventory contains 220 items and designed to assess five factors and seventeen sub dimensions. However, when only five factors need to be evaluated, administration of the long form of the inventory causes loss of time, effort and economic value. For this reason this study aims to develop a short form of the inventory to assess only the five factors of the scale. Methods: The data of the normative sample of 5239 participants of the inventory was divided into two. The first half consisting of 2000 participants was used for the selection of items, and the second half consisting of 3239 participants was used for cross validity study. The short form constructed was administered to a sample of 1518 participants as a third study. The results of the first two studies were compared with the data of the third study. Results: Out of the long form of the inventory 76 items for the five factors, 6 items for the social desirability dimension and 3 items as control items were selected by using item response theory. Various methods were used to determine the validity of the short form, and the correlations between the long and the short forms. High correlation coefficients were found for each of the factors of the long and the short forms in each of the three analyses of data. Structural validity of the short form was shown by explanatory and confirmatory factor analysis. Reliability values of the short form were close to the values of the long form in all of the studies. Test retest correlation coefficients of the short form were also high. All of the results showed very close factor values. Conclusion: It was seen that the developed short form of 85 items complied with five factor model and also protected the structure of the long form. Many strong correlations between the two forms showed that the short form represents the long form.