Comparing Brief Measures of Narcissism—Internal Consistency, Validity, Coverage

Many measures that vary in breadth and length have been constructed to measure narcissism, and in recent years, super-short forms (e.g., The Hypersensitive Narcissism Scale; HSNS; Hendin & Cheek, 1997, 10 items; The Narcissistic Personality Inventory-13; NPI-13; Gentile et al., 2013; 13 items) have become popular in research settings. Although brief measures hold many advantages, their brevity can come at psychometric costs (internal consistency and validity; Sleep, Lynam, & Miller, 2020), especially regarding a measure's construct validity (Smith, McCarthy, & Anderson, 2000). Smith et al. (2000) argue that these costs are realized depending on how short forms are developed, such as failing to demonstrate that a short form preserves each factor’s content coverage or replicates the factor structure from the parent measure and not testing the short form’s validity in an independent sample from that used for the parent measure. The comparative limitations of these short narcissism forms have received relatively little empirical examination, in terms of both comparing super-short forms to one another and to their longer counterparts. The goal of the current project is to fill this gap by determining the potential costs and benefits of using short measures of narcissism rather than longer measures. To accomplish this aim, the present study will compare the time to complete measures, their general psychometric properties, and their convergence with each other and with longer measures. The second aim of the project is to examine whether the three-factor structure of narcissism identified by Crowe et al. (2019) using full-length measures replicates when short forms are employed. Progress has been made in the past several years in elucidating the structure of narcissism (Crowe et al., 2019; Krizan & Herlache, 2018; Miller et al., 2016; Miller, Lynam, et al., 2017) by empirically examining narcissism's underlying facet-structure, and there is increasing recognition of its heterogeneity. Crowe et al. (2019) further clarified the structure of narcissism using the bass-ackward factor analytic approach, which produced a hierarchical model of narcissism based on how current narcissism scales measure and thus define narcissism. The current study will examine whether the Crowe et al. (2019) structure replicates using a subset of the items in a different sample. The bass-ackward approach will serve as a means of checking coverage among short forms as a whole, comparing their relations to external criteria (e.g., self-esteem, psychopathy), and comparing our factor loadings for each level to those of Crowe et al. (2019). These aims will be accomplished using an online community sample.