Psychometric properties of the Big Five Questionnaire-Children (BFQ-C) in American adolescents

The five-factor model of personality is a conceptual model for describing personality, and represents five traits which are theorized to interact with each other to form personality. The Big Five Questionnaire-Children (BFQ-C) was developed by Barbaranelli, Caprara, Rabasca and Pastorelli (2003) specifically to measure the five factor model in children. The original version was in Italian, but it has subsequently been translated and used in Dutch, German, and Spanish samples. Given that the BFQ-C has support in Europe, obtained in four different languages it seems promising as an assessment of personality for English speaking children and adolescents. The BFQ-C was translated into English utilizing translation and back translation in order to maintain a high conceptual equivalency. The current study utilizes principal components analysis in order to examine the structure of the English language translation of the BFQ-C in a sample of American adolescents. Results indicate that in contrast to the Italian study, findings from this study suggest a six component solution as the most effective interpretation of the data.