Big-Five Factor Markers (50 items)
Goldberg's classic 50-item public-domain inventory — ten uni-polar markers per factor — measuring the five broad dimensions of the Five-Factor Model. One of the most widely cited IPIP Big Five measures. Free.
Extraversion
Outgoing, talkative, assertive energy.
Agreeableness
Cooperative, warm, and sympathetic orientation.
Conscientiousness
Organized, dependable, and self-disciplined.
Emotional Stability
Calm, even-tempered, and resilient (reverse of Neuroticism).
Intellect / Imagination
Curious, inventive, and open to new ideas.
At a glance
About the measure
Goldberg's Big-Five Factor Markers are a set of 100 uni-polar adjective-like statements (50 selected here as a standard short form) designed to define the poles of each of the five broad personality dimensions. Unlike bipolar rating scales, each item is a pure positive-direction descriptor, making the factor structure unusually clean and replicable across samples. The five dimensions — Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Intellect/Imagination — map closely to the canonical Big Five, with the fifth factor labeled Intellect/Imagination rather than Openness to Experience to reflect the IPIP item content.
This is one of the most-used IPIP Big Five questionnaires in personality research, prized for its broad item coverage and straightforward factor structure.
Goldberg, L. R. (1992). The development of markers for the Big-Five factor structure. Items via the International Personality Item Pool (ipip.ori.org).Report includes
Five factor scores, each the mean of ten items (range 1–5), with a Higher / Average / Lower band relative to the full scale range. Population percentile and 90% confidence range computed from the ESCS reference sample.
Norms computed from the Eugene-Springfield Community Sample (ESCS) — Lewis R. Goldberg's adult community panel from Eugene and Springfield, Oregon (Harvard Dataverse, doi:10.7910/DVN/UF52WY). This is a community sample and is NOT nationally representative. The mean, standard deviation, reference N and Cronbach's α were computed directly from the raw IPIP item-level responses on THIS scale's exact item set and reverse-keying (complete cases); reference N varies by scale and is shown with each scale below. The confidence range uses the standard error of measurement (SEM = SD·√(1−α)) from that computed α.