Big Five
The five dimensions that survived a century of factor analysis.
- Questions
- 40
- 6 min
- Five-factor model (OCEAN)
What this is
Original items on the public five-factor structure, half of them reverse-keyed. The IPIP public-domain markers can be substituted as pure data if you want the validated wording.
Where it comes from
written down, not impliedFive-factor model (OCEAN)
The five-factor model grew out of Tupes and Christal's analyses (1961) and was developed by Costa and McCrae; its structure has been replicated across many languages. The NEO-PI-R's items are not used.
Written for this app
- Reliability
- not measured
- Factor structure
- not measured
- Validity
- not measured
Further reading
- Tupes, E. C., & Christal, R. E. (1961). Recurrent personality factors based on trait ratings (opens in a new tab). Technical Report ASD-TR-61-97, Personnel Laboratory, US Air Force. Reprinted in Journal of Personality, 60(2), 225–251 (1992)original source
- McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T., Jr. (1987). Validation of the five-factor model of personality across instruments and observers (opens in a new tab). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(1), 81–90original source
- McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T., Jr. (1997). Personality trait structure as a human universal (opens in a new tab). American Psychologist, 52(5), 509–516original source
- Block, J. (1995). A contrarian view of the five-factor approach to personality description (opens in a new tab). Psychological Bulletin, 117(2), 187–215critique
Read the result as a structured version of what you said, not as a measurement of you.
Why these questions carry no evidence
Every questionnaire in this app writes its own items, because the framework behind an instrument is usually public while the published questionnaire is copyrighted. That is the honest way to build it and it has a cost worth stating plainly: reliability and validity belong to a specific set of questions given to a specific group of people, not to the name of the idea behind them. These questions have never been given to a sample, have no norms, and have no evidence that they measure what they are named after.