Consistency of the Structural Properties of the BFI-10 Across 16 Samples From Eight Large-Scale Surveys in Germany

Abstract: The assessment of the Big Five personality domains is standard practice in most large-scale social surveys nowadays. The instrument most widely used for this purpose is the BFI-10, an ultra-short measure assessing each Big Five domain with two items. Recent studies have identified issues with the structural properties of the BFI-10, especially its factorial validity. To investigate whether these issues arise from the instrument itself or biases due to translation or sampling, we examined the extent to which the structural properties of the BFI-10 in terms of descriptive statistics, intercorrelations, reliability, and factorial validity vary when keeping the target population and language constant. Results revealed that, across 16 independent samples (total N ~ 60,000) from eight large-scale surveys representative of the adult population in Germany, the structural properties of the BFI-10 were (a) largely consistent and (b) mostly adequate. Most importantly, in nearly all samples, patterns of loading were congruent with an idealized Big Five structure, thereby supporting factorial validity. These results demonstrate that the structural properties of the BFI-10 are highly stable and replicable in large-scale samples. Especially given its brevity, the BFI-10 can thus be regarded as adequate for use in large-scale survey settings.