Miles Bore and Kristen Laurens, Megan Hobbs, Melissa Green,
Stacy Tzoumakis, Felicity Harrris, and Vaughan Carr. Item response theory
analysis of the Big Five Questionnaire for Children Short-Form (BFC-SF): A
self-report measure of personality in children aged 11-12 years. Journal of
Personality Disorders.
Some 12 or so years ago Miles became involved with the NSW Child
Development project which started its life at UON under the direction of
Professor Vaughan Carr. The project is following a cohort of children (and
their parents) who started Kindergarten in NSW in 2009 through the linkage of
health, education, child protection and justice records. As part of this larger
project, the research team wanted to obtain self-report data from the children
in what became the NSW Middle Childhood Survey (Laurens et al, 2017). We wanted
to include a measure of personality. But, could 11 and 12 year olds reliably
complete a self-report personality questionnaire? And, is personality
sufficiently developed at this age to be measurable?
In a nutshell – yes.
We modified the Big Five Questionnaire for Children
(Barbaranelli, et al, 2003) to create an English language short-form
self-report measure of extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness,
conscientiousness and openness (the ‘Big Five’). In 2015, children across NSW
completed a 30 minute online battery at 829 schools under the administration of
their teacher with the final sample being n = 27,415.
The data was then cleaned (a massive task lead by Melissa
Green at UNSW), analysed and the Big Five findings published in the Journal of
Personality Disorders. The Results section, undertaken and written by Prof
Kristen Laurens (now at ACU Brisbane), is a work of art in its own right using
exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis and IRT techniques.
The questionnaire has good psychometric properties and
(while more evidence is needed) does appear to measure the Big Five. Future
research will now be able to examine the role of personality as part of the
larger NSW Child Development linkage project.
The full paper can be found at: https://guilfordjournals.com/toc/pedi/0/0
