Psychology & Neuroscience Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for practitioners, researchers, and students in cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, and psychiatry. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I'm aware of a few freely available scientific measures of Big 5 personality.
Specifically, all items need to be available and it needs to be published in the scientific literature with reasonable reliability and validity data.
It should be noted that the IPIP has a range of multi-construct versions that are designed to align with some existing measures.
The BFI is available here in the Appendix of John and Srivastava (1999). Sanjay Srivastava has a page discussing the measure here. (Note the page also directed me to other options I mention below). It is not public domain but it appears to be free for research.
It is a 44 item measure of the Big 5. Each item involves short sentences.
As Sanjay Srivastava writes:
Colin DeYoung and colleagues have published a 100-item measure, called the Big Five Aspect Scales (BFAS), which scores not only the Big Five factors, but also two "aspects" of each. The BFAS is in the public domain as well.
Sanjay Srivastava notes that there is "Lew Goldberg's set of 100 trait-descriptive adjectives" (Goldberg, 1992).
Gerard Saucier reduced [Goldberg's] set to 40 Big Five mini-markers that have excellent reliability and validity (Saucier, 1994). More recently, Saucier has developed new trait marker sets that maximize the orthogonality of the factors (Saucier, 2002). Saucier's mini-markers are in the public domain.
While the HEXACO is actually based on a six factor model of personality, it does share similarities to the Big 5. Specifically, five of the six dimensions map on to the Big 5, and HEXACO adds honesty-humility. 60 and 100 item versions of the test are available on the website (and 200 item version is available by request).
The BFI-10 is another short version, a pared-down-to-ten-items variant of the Big Five Inventory...
Rammstedt, B., & John, O. P. (2007). Measuring personality in one minute or less: A 10-item short version of the Big Five Inventory in English and German. Journal of Research in Personality, 41(1), 203–212. Available online, URL: http://www.westmont.edu/_academics/departments/psychology/documents/Rammstedt_and_John.pdf.
