Big Five Personality Traits in Starting Cohorts 1-6 of the National Educational Panel Study

The National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) collects longitudinal data on educational trajectories across the German population. Personality is a key dimension of individual differences which potentially affects all aspects of life, including educational trajectories, job performance, social relations, and well-being. Personality assessment in NEPS includes the well-established Big Five personality traits—extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, negative emotionality, and openness to experience—across the life span. This paper documents the assessment of the Big Five personality traits in NEPS, including the theoretical background, measurement occasions, instruments, and basic psychometric properties. NEPS relies on ultra-short measures based on the Big Five Inventory (BFI), mainly the 10-item version (BFI-10), which provide an efficient measure of the trait domains while remaining feasible in large-scale assessments. Due to the brevity of the used scales, internal consistency estimates are typically low, and the limited scale length prevents the analysis of facets. Despite these limitations, NEPS data offers substantial analytical potential: the Big Five can be studied as predictors of educational outcomes, correlates of socio-emotional traits, and as outcomes influenced by educational trajectories and experiences. The study design, with repeated measurement across cohorts, provides unique opportunities to examine how personality develops over time and how it relates to competencies and educational environments.