Development of the Hogan Personality Content Single-Items Inventory

Abstract

The Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) and Hogan Developmental Survey (HDS) are among the most widely used and extensively well-validated personality inventories for organizational applications; however, they are rarely used in basic research. We describe the Hogan Personality Content Single-Items (HPCS) inventory, an inventory designed to measure the 74 content subscales of the HPI and HDS via a single-item each. We provide evidence of the reliability and validity of the HPCS, including item-level retest reliability estimates, both self-other agreement and other-other (or observer) agreement, convergent correlations with the corresponding scales from the full HPI/HDS instruments, and analyze how similarly the HPCS and full HPI/HDS instruments relate to other variables. We discuss situations where administering the HPCS may have certain advantages and disadvantages relative to the full HPI and HDS. We also discuss how the current findings contribute to an emerging picture of best practices for the development and use of inventories consisting of single-item scales.

Keywords: personality assessment; retest reliability; short scales; single-item scales.