Five-factor inventories have a major general factor related to social desirability which can be reduced by framing items neutrally.

By M. Bäckström, F. Björklund, Magnus R. Larsson. 2009

356 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eded45d2fec228ea49e680e51c49a733c93bbfd0

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Citations in the corpus

The General Factor of Personality (GFP) as social effectiveness: Review of the literature. (2016, background): “D. van der Linden et al. / Personality and Individual Differences 101 (2016) 98–105 101 & Larsson, 2014; Bäckström et al., 2009) who showed that when items are reformulated in a way that does not include a socially desirable di- rection, the shared variance of personality traits (i.e., the GFP) is…”
The ubiquity of common method variance: The case of the Big Five (2011, methodology): “In fact, Bäckström et al. (2009) were able to modify items in the IPIP 100-item Big Five questionnaire so that their loadings on a single method factor were considerably smaller than the loadings of the originally-worded items.”
A model of “substance” and “evaluation” in person judgments (2015, background): “Rather, the most important conceptual contributions may clearly be attributed to other authors, such as Edwards (1953), Peabody (1967), McCrae and Costa (1983), John and Robins (1993) and Bäckström et al. (2009) (see Introduction).”
Classroom ratings of likeability and popularity are related to the Big Five and the general factor of personality (2010, background): “Specifically, it has been argued that a GFP merely reflects methodological artifacts such as social desirability or statistical artifacts (Ashton et al., 2009; Bäckström et al., 2009) However, the fact that in the present study, the GFP was related to peer-ratings of social status makes it less like”
Does self-esteem account for the higher-order factors of the Big Five? (2009, background): “Social desirability almost certainly accounts for some of the shared variance found in higher-order factors (Backstrom et al., 2009).”
Construct validation using multitrait‐multimethod‐twin data: The case of a general factor of personality (2010, methodology): “However, the correlation has often been found across different measures of the Big Five, different methods and several languages (Bäckström et al., 2009; Costa & McCrae, 1992; Graziano &Ward, 1992; John, Goldberg, Angleitner, 1984; Ostendorf & Angleitner, 2004; Yik & Bond, 1993).”
Overlap between General Factors of Personality in the Big Five, Giant Three, and trait emotional intelligence (2012, neutral): “Several studies have indicated that the GFP predominantly reflects socially desirable responding tendencies (Anusic et al., 2009; Bäckström et al., 2009), whereas other studies indicated that social desirability as a bias is not a good explanation for the GFP (e.g., Erdle & Rushton, 2011).”
Evolution, situational affordances, and the HEXACO model of personality (2016, background): “independent factors of personality (Ashton & Lee, 2010; Ashton et al., 2009; Bäckström et al., 2009; De Raad et al., 2014).”
The General Factor of Personality, BIS-BAS, expectancies of reward and punishment, self-esteem, and positive and negative affect (2010, methodology): “Bäckstrom et al. (2009) found that social desirability contributed to higher-order factors above the Big Five, but that they were still recovered after controlling for these effects.”
Assessing Personality States: What to Consider when Constructing Personality State Measures (2020, background): “As Bäckström, Björklund, and Larsson (2009) reported, formulating items in trait measures more neutrally (e.g. ‘I swim regularly’ vs. ‘I love swimming’) reduces their interrelatedness, or their common method variance (Bäckström & Björklund, 2013).”
Descriptive, Predictive and Explanatory Personality Research: Different Goals, Different Approaches, but a Shared Need to Move beyond the Big Few Traits (2020, background): “This hierarchy arises because most Big Few traits inter-correlate, suggesting few very general super-traits such as Stability and Plasticity (DeYoung, 2006), although methodological artifacts may contribute to this (Bäckström, Björklund, & Larsson, 2009; Riemann & Kandler, 2010).”
The correlation between general intelligence (g), a general factor of personality (GFP), and social desirability (2010, background): “Bäckström, Björklund, and Larsson (2009) recently demonstrated that the correlations between the factors in the Big Five, are partially due to social desirability.”
The General Factor of Personality and Evaluation (2012, methodology): “It should also be noted that the magnitude of the nonevaluative factor intercorrelations became quite small once evaluation was controlled for (cf. Bäckström, 2007; Bäckström et al., 2009).”