All scales

Ten-Item Personality Inventory

TIPI
psychologysocial sciencesFree for research use

A very brief 10-item measure of the Big Five personality dimensions (Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Openness), with two items per dimension. Intended for use when brevity is essential; sacrifices internal consistency for breadth.

Items
10
Response format
7-point Likert scale
Version
1.0
Subscales
5

Ready-to-cite methods sentence

Personality traits were assessed using the Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI; Gosling, Rentfrow, & Swann, 2003), a brief measure of the Big Five. Subscale scores were computed as the mean of two items, with the second item in each pair reverse-scored. The TIPI trades internal consistency for brevity; the authors show acceptable test-retest reliability and convergent validity with longer instruments.

Reliability & validation

notes
Low internal consistency is expected and acceptable given two-item subscales; test-retest and convergent validity with longer Big Five measures are strong. Test-retest averaged .72 over 6 weeks in the original paper.
Validation population
Undergraduate and community samples
Test–retest
0.72
cronbach alpha range
0.4,0.73

Subscales

ExtraversionAgreeablenessConscientiousnessEmotional StabilityOpenness to Experiences

Response anchors

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

Known limitations

Low Cronbach's alpha is expected with two-item subscales and should not be interpreted as poor reliability — use test-retest or convergent validity statistics instead. Not appropriate when dimension-level precision is critical.

Original citation

Gosling, S. D., Rentfrow, P. J., Swann, W. B., Jr. (2003). A very brief measure of the Big-Five personality domains. Journal of Research in Personality, 37(6), 504-528.

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0092-6566(03)00046-1

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