Development and Validation of a Dutch Translation of the Big Five Inventory (BFI)

Abstract

In this article, we describe the translation and validation of the Dutch Big Five Inventory (BFI; John & Srivastava, 1999), a short instrument designed to measure the Big Five factors of personality. We obtained evidence of the instrument's good psychometric properties in terms of factorial equivalence to the English original and other BFI translations and the relative independence and internal consistency of the five scales. The findings suggest that the instrument can be used in diverse age groups without substantial changes in factor structure. The Dutch BFI scales showed similar demographic correlates as the English original, with higher Agreeableness and Conscientiousness and lower Neuroticism values in older participants, higher Neuroticism values in women, and higher Openness and Conscientiousness values in better educated participants. Use of the Dutch BFI will allow researchers to integrate their findings with the extant Big Five research literature. The brevity of the instrument will be appealing to researchers who are concerned about taxing the time and motivation of their participants.

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge our Master students Femke Ponte, Ronald Huiskes, and Coraline Barends for their help in translating the BFI.

Jaap J. A. Denissen, Jaap J. A. Denissen is now at the Institute of Psychology, Humboldt-University, Germany.

Notes

The factor solutions for the different age groups can be obtained from J. J. A. Denissen.