The impact of acquiescence on the evaluation of personality structure

Acquiescence, or the tendency to respond to descriptions of conceptually distinct personality attributes with agreement/affirmation (acceptance acquiescence) or disagreement/opposition (counter-acquiescence), has been widely recognized as a source of bias that can substantially alter interitem correlations within scales. Acquiescence is also known to operate differently among some groups of persons; it is, for example, more pronounced among individuals with less formal education. Consequently, the biasing effects of acquiescence are of particular concern when the dimensionality underlying the item set of a measure is examined with representative samples comprised of persons with varying levels of educational attainment and evaluated with correlation-based statistical methods such as factor analysis. In the present study, we extended our earlier research by investigating the biasing effect of acquiescence on personality factor structures derived from the full-scale version of the Big Five Inventory (BFI) when administered to a large sample (N = 1,427) selected to be representative of Germany's adult population. Consistent with previous findings based on a short-scale version of the BFI, factor analyses of the unadjusted BFI item set failed to replicate the expected Big Five-factor structure in the low/medium and high educational groups, with distortions in factor structure more pronounced in the former group. Once acquiescence was controlled in the item responses for both groups, however, the obtained factor structures were consistent with the Big Five framework. The implications of acquiescence on the evaluation of the factor structure of personality inventories and for the validity of personality assessments are discussed.