Evaluation of a very short test to measure the Big Five personality factors on a Flemish sample

In this paper, we study the psychometric properties of the ten-item version of the Big Five Inventory as a subset of the original BFI in a Flemish sample. The data come from the Divorce in Flanders study and consist of a full sample of 7533 individuals from 4460 families. Factor analysis shows the presence of the Big Five factor structure with very high primary loadings for most items. However, one of the Agreeableness items loads exclusively on the Extraversion factor and within-factor correlations are also low. Despite this, the BFI-10 correlates well with the BFI. Therefore, while more research is needed before validity and reliability of the Dutch-language version of the test can be concluded, it is clear that the BFI-10 may prove very effective in the assessment of the Big Five factors in the Flemish and Dutch cultures when assessment with longer questionnaires is not feasible.status: publishe