Development and Initial Validation of the Five-Factor Model Adolescent Personality Questionnaire (FFM-APQ)

Abstract

This research reports on the 4-phase development of the 25-item Five-Factor Model Adolescent Personality Questionnaire (FFM–APQ). The purpose was to develop and determine initial evidence for validity of a brief adolescent personality inventory using a vocabulary that could be understood by adolescents up to 18 years old. Phase 1 (N = 48) consisted of item generation and expert (N = 5) review of items; Phase 2 (N = 179) involved item analyses; in Phase 3 (N = 496) exploratory factor analysis assessed the underlying structure; in Phase 4 (N = 405) confirmatory factor analyses resulted in a 25-item inventory with 5 subscales.

Adolescence is a critical period in an individual's development when young people strive to establish their identity to understand aspects of themselves, including their personality, or those individual differences comprising their core self. The nature and development of adolescent personality is underresearched (Shiner & Caspi, 2003 Shiner, R. L., & Caspi, A. (2003). Personality differences in childhood and adolescence: Measurement, development, and consequences. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 44, 2–32. doi:10.1111/1469-7610.00101 [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar] ). This could be partly due to a lack of self-report measures designed for adolescents, or that some measures are too long, or might include questions that adolescents do not understand or cannot answer. The aim of this research was to develop an adolescent personality inventory, based on the Five-Factor Model (FFM) of personality, using a vocabulary that could be understood by contemporary adolescents up to 18 years old, and provide some initial evidence of validation. Although developing a useful and accessible measure is an aim of this article, an aligned purpose is to make a theoretical contribution to personality research that further elucidates adolescent personality development.