A five-factor inventory with evaluatively neutralized items

Personality is normally measured by means of self-ratings. Despite some drawbacks, the method is here to stay, and improving on it, particularly with regards to social desirability, is essential. One way to do this is evaluative neutralization, i.e. to rephrase items such that it is less obvious to the respondent what would be a desirable response. We present an evaluatively neutralized five-factor inventory and compare it to the IPIP-NEO (Goldberg et al., 2006). Psychometric analyses revealed that the new inventory has high factor homogeneity, relatively independent facets with acceptable homogeneity and normally distributed ratings, and generally evaluatively neutral ratings (as indicated by level of item popularity). In sum, this new inventory captures the same personality variance as other five factor inventories but with less influence from individual differences in evaluative responding, resulting in less correlation between factors and a factor structure more in line with the simple structure model than many other five factor inventories. Evaluatively neutralized inventories should be particularly useful when the factor structure is central to the research question and when focus is on discriminant validity, such as identification of theoretically valid relationships between personality and other concepts.