The Big Five personality dimensions in large-scale surveys: An overview of 25 German data sets for personality research

Abstract

In recent decades, the number of large-scale surveys that have included measures of the Big Five personality traits in their standard questionnaires has grown sharply both in Germany and internationally. Consequently, a vast, heterogeneous, high-quality data base is now readily available to personality psychologists for secondary analyses. In this paper, we provide an overview of 25 public large-scale surveys assessing the Big Five. Our aim is to increase researchers’ awareness of the availability and analytical potential of these data, and ultimately to increase their reuse. We restricted our selection to surveys of the adult population, conducted in Germany, based on probabilistic samples with a minimum sample size of 1,500 respondents, and assessing all Big Five dimensions with a validated Big Five instrument. We describe the study designs, the measures used to assess the Big Five, and the research potential of these valuable data.