TY - JOUR

T1 - Extracting Agency and Communion From the Big Five

T2 - A Four-Way Competition

AU - Entringer, Theresa M.

AU - Gebauer, Jochen E.

AU - Paulhus, Delroy L.

N1 - Funding Information: The author(s) discosed the follwing financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: We acknowledge support from the German Research Foundation (DFG; Grants GE 2515/3-1 and GE 2515/6-1) and the Social Science and Humanities Council of Canada (435-2015-0417). Publisher Copyright: © The Author(s) 2021.

PY - 2022/9

Y1 - 2022/9

N2 - Agency and communion are the two fundamental content dimensions in psychology. The two dimensions figure prominently in many psychological realms (personality, social, self, motivational, cross-cultural, etc.). In contemporary research, however, personality is most commonly measured within the Big Five framework. We developed novel agency and communion scales based on the items from the most popular nonpropriety measure of the Big Five—the Big Five Inventory. We compared four alternative scale-construction methods: expert rating, target scale, ant colony, and brute force. Across three samples (Ntotal = 942), all methods yielded reliable and valid agency and communion scales. Our research provides two main contributions. For psychometric theory, it extends knowledge on the four scale-construction methods and their relative convergence. For psychometric practice, it enables researchers to examine agency and communion hypotheses with extant Big Five Inventory data sets, including those collected in their own labs as well as openly accessible, large-scale data sets.

AB - Agency and communion are the two fundamental content dimensions in psychology. The two dimensions figure prominently in many psychological realms (personality, social, self, motivational, cross-cultural, etc.). In contemporary research, however, personality is most commonly measured within the Big Five framework. We developed novel agency and communion scales based on the items from the most popular nonpropriety measure of the Big Five—the Big Five Inventory. We compared four alternative scale-construction methods: expert rating, target scale, ant colony, and brute force. Across three samples (Ntotal = 942), all methods yielded reliable and valid agency and communion scales. Our research provides two main contributions. For psychometric theory, it extends knowledge on the four scale-construction methods and their relative convergence. For psychometric practice, it enables researchers to examine agency and communion hypotheses with extant Big Five Inventory data sets, including those collected in their own labs as well as openly accessible, large-scale data sets.

KW - agency

KW - Big Five

KW - communion

KW - scale construction

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85103898436&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1177/10731911211003978

DO - 10.1177/10731911211003978

M3 - Journal article

C2 - 33813905

AN - SCOPUS:85103898436

VL - 29

SP - 1216

EP - 1235

JO - Assessment

JF - Assessment

SN - 1073-1911

IS - 6

ER -