Big Five Inventory

BFI-44

psychologysocial scienceseducationFree for research use

A 44-item self-report inventory measuring the Big Five personality dimensions (Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, Openness) using short phrase items. A de-facto standard in personality research — balances brevity with subscale-level reliability.

Items

Response format

5-point Likert scale

Version

1.0

Subscales

Ready-to-cite methods sentence

Personality traits were assessed using the 44-item Big Five Inventory (BFI; John, Donahue, & Kentle, 1991; John, Naumann, & Soto, 2008) on a 5-point Likert scale. Subscale scores were computed as the mean of their constituent items after reverse-scoring the flagged items.

Reliability & validation

notes

Mean alpha ≈ .83 across the five subscales in John & Srivastava (1999).

Validation population

US and Canadian undergraduate and community samples

subscale alphas

[object Object]

cronbach alpha range

0.75,0.9

Subscales

ExtraversionAgreeablenessConscientiousnessNeuroticismOpenness

Response anchors

Disagree strongly · Disagree a little · Neither agree nor disagree · Agree a little · Agree strongly

Known limitations

Widely used in English-speaking samples. For cross-cultural work, the BFI-2 (Soto & John, 2017) offers updated items and improved structure. Subscales are not independent — small positive correlations among Big Five dimensions are normal and expected.

Original citation

John, O. P., Donahue, E. M., Kentle, R. L. (1991). The Big Five Inventory — Versions 4a and 54.

Use BFI-44 in Folio Surveyor

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Open Surveyor

Library entry verified January 2024. Metadata is provided for reference; item wording is available inside Folio Surveyor, subject to each instrument's licensing.