Comparing Brief Measures of Narcissisminternal Consistency, Validity, Coverage

Melissa Packer West, Purdue University

Abstract

Narcissism is a personality construct linked to dysfunction in several domains. It encompasses grandiose and vulnerable variants as well as antagonism, agentic extraversion, and neuroticism higher-order factors. Many measures that vary in breadth and length have been constructed to measure narcissism. In recent years, super-short forms have become popular in research settings. Although brief measures hold some advantages, their brevity can come at psychometric costs. The comparative limitations of these short narcissism forms have received relatively little empirical examination. The goal of the current project was to fill this gap by determining the potential costs and benefits of using short measures of narcissism rather than longer measures in an online community sample (N= 473). This examination included assessing short form completion time, psychometric properties, structure, and measurement invariance across gender. Generally, the short forms demonstrated adequate internal consistency, variable convergence with each other, and mostly moderate to strong convergence with long forms.Short forms with long form counterparts performed well in terms of accounting for the variance of their long form counterparts. The short form items used for the bass-ackward analysis successfully replicated the factor structure of narcissism found by Crowe et al. (2019) using longer narcissism measures at both the two- and three-factor level, which showed measurement invariance across gender, generally at the scalar invariance level. Taken together, these findings suggest that it is still likely most advantageous to use the long forms whenever possible but that some short forms could be used when efficiency of survey administration is particularly important without significant psychometric cost.

Degree

M.Sc.

Advisors

Lynam, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Behavioral psychology|Clinical psychology|Gender studies|Law enforcement|Personality psychology|Psychology

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