Development of a new abbreviated form of the Eysenck personality questionnaire-revised with multidimensional item response theory

The present work consists of two studies. In the first study, a new abbreviated form of the EPQ-R (six items per scale) was developed from the 100 items of the full-length version of the questionnaire. Methods and procedures developed within the framework of multidimensional IRT were used for this purpose. In the second study, the abbreviated questionnaire was validated on a new data sample. In addition, latent profile analysis was used to identify groups of individuals characterized by similar patterns of the four PEN-L traits. These patterns were also compared with respect to indicators of psychosocial functioning. Results indicated that the new abbreviated form of the questionnaire outperforms the old abbreviated form with respect to reliability and approximation of measures obtained with the full-length test. Moreover, the four-factor structure of the instrument and its convergent validity have been confirmed. Three PEN-L patterns have been identified that differ for anxiety and depression, satisfaction for social relations, frequency of substance use and sexual risk behaviors.