Relations entre le Big Five Inventory français et le manuel diagnostique des troubles mentaux dans un échantillon clinique français

The Big Five Inventory (BFI) was designed to provide researchers and clinicians with an efficient measure of individual differences on the so-called Big Five factors of normal personality: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness to Experience. The present article has two objectives: a) to introduce the BFI-Français, a French language version of the BFI; and b) to use the BFI-Français to study the relations between normal personality traits and the DSM classification of psychiatric disorders. Three French samples (161 medical students, 200 hospital employees, 106 psychiatric inpatients) completed the 44-item BFI-Français. DSM-IV diagnoses were made for each inpatient. The psychometric data obtained from the combined French samples were compared to US and Spanish samples. Means, standard deviations, internal consistency reliabilities, and factor structure were similar in all samples; thus, the BFI-Français provides an efficient, psychometrically sound way to measure the five personality factors in French samples. As expected, scores on the BFI-Français were related systematically to DSM diagnoses on both Axis I and II. Findings were consistent with the recent literature; since past research has relied primarily on Anglo-American and non-clinical samples, the present findings contribute importantly to establishing the generality of the links between personality traits and DSM.