The Factor Structure of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory

Abstract

In the first study, we administered the 40-item Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI; Raskin & Terry, 1988 Raskin, R. and Terry, H. 1988. A principal-components analysis of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory and further evidence of its construct validity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54: 890–902. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) to 843 female and 843 male college students, most of whom were Euro-American, to comprehensively assess the NPI factor structure using confirmatory factor analysis. Initial exploratory common factor analyses (N = 724) revealed a 2-factor model (Leadership/Authority and Exhibitionism/Entitlement). Subsequently, we used confirmatory factor analysis in a separate sample (N = 724) to evaluate the Emmons (1987) Emmons, R. A. 1987. Narcissism: Theory and measurement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52: 11–17. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] 4-factor model, the Raskin and Terry (1988) Raskin, R. and Terry, H. 1988. A principal-components analysis of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory and further evidence of its construct validity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54: 890–902. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] 7-factor model, the Kubarych, Deary, and Austin (2004) Kubarych, T. S., Deary, I. J. and Austin, E. J. 2004. The narcissistic personality inventory: factor structure in a non-clinical sample. Personality and Individual Differences, 36: 857–872. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] 2- and 3-factor models, and our 2-factor model. Finally, we assessed construct validity by correlating the scale scores with the Five-factor model of personality in an independent sample (N = 238). The 2-factor models for the NPI we obtained in this study and by Kubarych et al. (2004) Kubarych, T. S., Deary, I. J. and Austin, E. J. 2004. The narcissistic personality inventory: factor structure in a non-clinical sample. Personality and Individual Differences, 36: 857–872. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] appeared to be the most parsimonious models, with both a good fit to the data and satisfactory internal consistency values; so they are recommended for use. However, additional NPI research is needed to rescale, modify, or omit several NPI items and develop gender-equivalent items.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 272 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.