Introduction

The BIG 5 is one of the leading models to express the most important dimensions of personality, namely:

  • Openness,

  • Conscientiousness,

  • Extraversion,

  • Agreeableness,

  • Neuroticism (also known as emotional instability)

You can remember these easily as OCEAN (the first letter of each trait).

Watch short video about the BIG 5 personality

Typically, questionnaires measuring BIG 5 dimenionsions can take some time, but there are short ones of only 10 items that are reasonably reliable (depending on what you need it for, etc, see the accompanying paper by Gosling and colleagues, 2003).

See also the BFI-S here in the PsyToolkit survey library.
There are alternative models of personality, some of them quite different.

Below are the "normative data" taken from the Gosling et al. (2003) paper (Appendix B, p.526) for all ethnicities. This is a sample of 1812 students at a university in the USA (all ethnicities). For more details (including standard deviation), please read the original paper by Gosling and colleagues, 2003).

Group Extraversion Agreeableness Conscientiousness Emotional Stability Openness

All

4.44

5.23

5.40

4.83

5.38

Men

4.25

5.06

5.19

5.13

5.34

Women

4.54

5.32

5.51

4.66

5.40

Run the demo

Click here to run a demo of the survey

The survey code for PsyToolkit

Copy and paste this code to your PsyToolkit account if you want to use the scale in your own online research project
scale: agree
- Disagree strongly
- Disagree moderately
- Disagree a little
- Neither agree nor disagree
- Agree a little
- Agree moderately
- Agree strongly

l: tipi
t: scale agree
o: width 20%
q: Now you see a number of statements about how you see yourself. For each statement, you need to select one of seven statements. Select the option that fits best.
<b>I see myself as ...</b>
- Extroverted, enthusiastic
- {reverse} Critical, quarrelsome
- Dependable, self-disciplined
- {reverse} Anxious, easily upset
- Open to new experiences, complex
- {reverse} Reserved, quiet
- Sympathetic, warm
- {reverse} Disorganized, careless
- Calm, emotionally stable
- {reverse} Conventional, uncreative

l: extraversion
t: set
- mean $tipi.1 $tipi.6

l: agreeableness
t: set
- mean $tipi.2 $tipi.7

l: conscientiousness
t: set
- mean $tipi.3 $tipi.8

l: emotionally_stable
t: set
- mean $tipi.4 $tipi.9

l: openness
t: set
- mean $tipi.5 $tipi.10

l: feedback
t: info
q: Your BIG5 dimensions are as follows (on a 1-7 scale):
<ul>
<li>Extraversion: {$extraversion}
<li>Agreeableness: {$agreeableness}
<li>Conscientiousness: {$conscientiousness}
<li>Emotional stability: {$emotionally_stable}
<li>Openness to experience: {$openness}
</ul>

References

  • S. D. Gosling, P. J. Rentfrow, and W. B. Swann Jr. (2003). A very brief measure of the Big-Five personality domains. Journal of Research in Personality, 37, 504-528.