The short IPIP-BFM-20 questionnaire for measuring the Big Five

The most frequently used measures of personality consist of a large number of items. However, it is their short versions that have enjoyed popularity in recent years. This article is a presentation of the short form of Goldberg’s questionnaire for measuring the Big Five personality traits. The questionnaire measures five traits (Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Intellect), and consists of 20 items. It is a shortened version of the 50-item Big Five Markers questionnaire from the resources of the International Personality Item Pool, whose Polish version was prepared by Strus, Cieciuch, and Rowiński (2014b). In constructing the short version, we followed the procedure developed by Donnellan and colleagues (2006), aimed at maximizing the internal consistency and independence of scales. The research was carried out on a group of N = 903 people aged between 16 and 83 years. The validity (verified in confirmatory factor analysis and in the analysis of correlations between the questionnaire’s scales and other measures of the five personality traits) and reliability (measured by Cronbach’s alpha coefficient) are satisfactory and make the questionnaire fit for use in scientific research.