Development and Validation of the Five-Factor Borderline Inventory-Super Short Form and Screener

Area of Science:

• Psychological assessment
• Personality disorders
• Psychometrics

Background:

• The Five-Factor Borderline Inventory (FFBI) and FFBI-Short Form (FFBI-SF) assess maladaptive personality traits associated with borderline personality disorder (BPD).
• Existing measures can be lengthy, limiting their use in large-scale research and clinical settings.
• There is a need for brief, reliable instruments to assess BPD traits dimensionally.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a super short form (FFBI-SSF) and a screener (FFBI-Screener) from the FFBI-SF.
• To facilitate the use of dimensional trait measures for BPD assessment.
• To create brief tools for large-scale research and clinical screening.

Main Methods:

• Item response theory (IRT) analyses were employed to reduce the 48-item FFBI-SF to a 22-item FFBI-SSF.
• The FFBI-SSF was retested on a separate sample to ensure replicability.
• IRT was used again to further reduce the measure to a four-item screener.
• Correlations between the new measures and BPD-related variables were examined across five independent samples.

Main Results:

• The FFBI-SSF demonstrated strong replicability across independent samples.
• The FFBI-SSF showed similar correlations to the FFBI-SF at both full and domain-level scales.
• The FFBI-Screener demonstrated similar correlations to the FFBI-SF at the full scale level.

Conclusions:

• The developed FFBI-SSF and FFBI-Screener are brief, psychometrically sound instruments for assessing BPD traits.
• These tools are suitable for use in large-scale research studies.
• The FFBI-Screener can serve as an efficient screening tool in clinical settings.