Measuring Narcissism with Alternate Response Formats of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory

Narcissism has a long history in the field of psychology, proving to be a rather robust psychological construct over the years. Social psychology distinguishes from "normal" narcissism and Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The most widely used and most researched measure of narcissism is the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI). Recently, more and more studies have been using different formats of the NPI, with the most common being a True-False format. The current study compared the Forced-Choice format of the NPI with the True-False format by examining the psychometric properties of each and testing the relation of each format with other constructs commonly associated with narcissism. Findings revealed that the True-False format yields higher scores in comparison to the Forced-Choice format of the NPI. However, results indicated that the two versions are comparable in their ability to predict other variables and share similar psychometric properties.