A 'Big Five' Scoring System for the Item Pool of the Adjective Check List

Abstract

The item pool of the Adjective Check List (ACL; Gough & Heilbrun, 1980) is widely used as a means of capturing the personal characteristics associated with various target groups (e.g., women vs. men, young adults vs. old adults). The purpose of this research was to develop a system for scoring the ACL items in terms of the five-factor model of personality. In Study 1, five groups of introductory psychology students served as judges, with each group of approximately 100 persons rating the 300 ACL items for one of the five factors. The ratings of each factor were highly reliable. When corrected for favorability, the intercorrelations among the five factors were quite low, as expected, except for the positive correlation of Openness and Extraversion. Good convergence was found between our ratings and the indicative and counterindicative items identified by John's (1989) graduate student judges. In Study 2, convergent validity was demonstrated between the five-factor scores obtained from self-descriptive ACLs and corresponding factor scores obtained from Costa and McCrae's NEO-PI-R and NEO-FFI instruments (Costa & McCrae, 1992). Data from earlier cross-cultural studies of gender and age stereotypes were rescored using the new ACL-FF system to illustrate its potential utility as a research tool.