Research instrument
BFI-2
Big Five Inventory-2
A 60-item Big Five inventory that adds a validated facet layer, and the instrument to reach for when you want research quality without a 30-minute commitment.
Why that grade: Developed and validated in a peer-reviewed programme with published psychometrics, and independently translated and replicated across a large number of languages since.
- Cost
- Free
- Time
- 8-12 min
- Items
- 60
- Published
- 2017
Sixty items on the standard form: five domains, fifteen facets, four items per facet. A 30-item short form (BFI-2-S) and a 15-item extra-short form (BFI-2-XS) trade facet resolution for speed.
Origin
Christopher J. Soto and Oliver P. John
What you get free: The full instrument, scoring key, and short forms are published free for research and non-commercial use.
The verdict
The best value in personality assessment. Ten minutes, no cost, no account, and a facet structure that was validated in the peer-reviewed literature rather than asserted in a marketing page. Start here.
Strengths
- Fifteen validated facets from sixty items, which is an unusually good resolution-per-minute ratio.
- Item wording was deliberately simplified from the original BFI, so it reads cleanly for non-specialists and translates well.
- Short forms are published by the same authors with known psychometric costs, instead of being improvised by whoever needed a quicker version.
- Free, citable, and available in a large number of validated translations.
Limitations
- Four items per facet is thin. Treat facet scores as suggestive and domain scores as solid, not the other way round.
- There is no polished consumer-facing report. You get scores, and interpreting them is your problem.
- Renaming Neuroticism to Negative Emotionality softens the label without changing what is being measured, which can make a high score easier to dismiss than it should be.
- Like every self-report inventory here, it measures how you describe yourself, which is related to but not identical with how you behave.
Why a second Big Five Inventory existed to be written
The original Big Five Inventory, published in 1991, was short and widely used and measured only the five broad domains. That is a real limitation, because two people with identical Conscientiousness scores can differ enormously in whether that shows up as tidiness or as reliability. The BFI-2 was built to fix exactly this, adding three facets under each domain without inflating the instrument past sixty items.
The authors also rewrote the items. The originals were adjective-based and assumed a reader comfortable with words like "thorough" in a psychometric sense. The BFI-2 uses full sentences at a lower reading level, which is a quiet but substantial improvement for anyone administering it outside a university subject pool.
How it compares to the longer inventories
Against the IPIP-NEO-120 it trades facet resolution for time: thirty facets measured with four items each versus fifteen facets measured with four items each, at half the length. Against the commercial NEO-PI-3 it trades a professional norm-referenced report for being free and citable.
For most readers the BFI-2 is the better first instrument and the IPIP-NEO-120 is the better second one. If you find the domain scores interesting enough to want more detail, that is the moment to spend the extra twenty minutes.
What it reports back
Results are expressed as continuous traits.
- Extraversion
- Sociability, Assertiveness, and Energy Level.
- Agreeableness
- Compassion, Respectfulness, and Trust.
- Conscientiousness
- Organization, Productiveness, and Responsibility.
- Negative Emotionality
- Anxiety, Depression, and Emotional Volatility. This is Neuroticism, renamed to something less pejorative.
- Open-Mindedness
- Intellectual Curiosity, Aesthetic Sensitivity, and Creative Imagination.
The evidence, with sources
Nothing in this section is stated without an attribution. Where a figure varies by version or sample, the range is given rather than the most flattering number.
Reliability
Soto and John report strong internal consistency and retest reliability for the five BFI-2 domain scales, with the four-item facet scales predictably lower but still adequate for research use.
peer reviewedSoto & John (2017), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(1), 117-143The abbreviated BFI-2-S and BFI-2-XS forms retain most of the domain-level reliability of the full form, at the cost of facet-level precision that the authors explicitly warn against relying on.
peer reviewedSoto & John (2017), Journal of Research in Personality, 68, 69-81
Validity
The fifteen-facet structure was validated against self-reports and peer reports, and the facets show discriminant validity within their own domains rather than collapsing into the domain score.
peer reviewedSoto & John (2017), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(1), 117-143Because the BFI-2 measures the same five domains as its predecessors, the broader Big Five outcome literature applies to it directly rather than by analogy.
meta analysisRoberts, Kuncel, Shiner, Caspi & Goldberg (2007), Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2(4), 313-345
Who it actually fits
- Readers who want Big Five rigour in about ten minutes
- Researchers and students needing a citable, free, translated instrument
- Anyone who found a 120-item inventory too long to finish honestly
Not a diagnosis