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Personality

Big Five Personality (Extended).

A 120-item Big Five personality assessment measuring Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Emotional Stability. Each domain is assessed with 24 items covering six facets, providing a detailed personality profile.

Time
About 25 min
Questions
120
Measures 5 traits

Instructions

Read each of the 120 statements and rate how accurately it describes you. There are no right or wrong answers - answer honestly based on how you actually are.

What to expect

Scientifically validated
Based on established psychological research
Private results
Your data is secure and private
Detailed results
Comprehensive insights and recommendations

About the Big Five Test with Facets (120 Items)

This is the facet-level Big Five test. It measures the same five broad traits as the standard form - Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Emotional Stability - but goes a layer deeper, resolving six narrow facets beneath each trait, for 30 facets in all. With 24 statements per trait it takes about 25 minutes.

Facets are where two people with the same trait score stop looking alike. Two equally conscientious people can differ sharply once you separate orderliness from industriousness, or self-discipline from cautiousness; a 50-item form averages those facets into a single number and cannot tell them apart. This 120-item version follows the IPIP-NEO-120 tradition, a public-domain successor to the facet structure of the commercial NEO inventories, and gives you a profile that shows not just how high each trait sits but which parts of it drive that score.

This is the facet-level form in our Big Five family. The standard 50-item Big Five test is the canonical version and is faster; choose this 120-item form when you specifically want the 30 narrow facets beneath the five traits, and the 300-item form when you want the most reliable facet scores available.

Items
120
Duration
About 25 min
Format
5-point accuracy ratings, 24 items per trait across six facets each
Free result
Free, right after the test: your strongest trait and its band. The other traits are named and covered in the full report
Full report
With a free account: the full report for every trait

What it measures

Each of the five traits is a continuous spectrum, and so is each facet within it - the report describes both poles of every dimension without treating either as better. The added value here is resolution. Underneath each broad trait, six facets break the trait into its component tendencies, so your profile can show, for example, that your Conscientiousness is built more on orderliness than on a drive to achieve, or that your Extraversion is high in friendliness but moderate in assertiveness. The five traits below are the headline dimensions; the facet breakdown sits beneath each one in your results.

  • OpennessImagination, intellectual curiosity, and aesthetic sensitivity versus a preference for the familiar and concrete, resolved into facets such as imagination, artistic interests, and intellect.
  • ConscientiousnessOrganization, diligence, and self-discipline versus a more flexible, spontaneous style, separated into facets such as orderliness, dutifulness, achievement-striving, and self-discipline.
  • ExtraversionSociability, assertiveness, and energy from engagement versus a quieter orientation, broken into facets such as friendliness, gregariousness, assertiveness, and excitement-seeking.
  • AgreeablenessWarmth, cooperation, and trust versus a more skeptical, competitive style, resolved into facets such as trust, altruism, cooperation, and sympathy.
  • Emotional StabilityCalm and resilience under stress versus sensitivity to negative emotion, with the underlying facets covering tendencies such as anxiety, anger, vulnerability, and self-consciousness.

The science and validity

The five-factor structure is one of the most replicated findings in personality psychology, recovered across cultures, languages, ages, and instruments. What a facet-level form adds is hierarchical detail: below each broad factor sit narrower traits that carry their own predictive information, and research shows facets can improve prediction of specific outcomes beyond the broad trait alone. The 30-facet scheme this test follows originates with the NEO inventories and was carried into the public domain by the International Personality Item Pool.

Our scale uses the IPIP-NEO-120, the 120-item form developed by John A. Johnson from Goldberg’s IPIP item set. Its published quality is sound for a form of this length: the 24-item trait scales give very consistent scores, and the 4-item facet scales, while necessarily less consistent than longer facet measures, still separate the intended facets well. Your scores are compared with other people, and the detailed report is generated from your scored profile by strict scoring rules - the same inputs always produce the same interpretation.

References

  1. Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 78-89.
  2. Goldberg, L. R., Johnson, J. A., Eber, H. W., Hogan, R., Ashton, M. C., Cloninger, C. R., & Gough, H. G. (2006). The International Personality Item Pool and the future of public-domain personality measures. Journal of Research in Personality, 40(1), 84-96.
  3. Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) and NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) professional manual. Psychological Assessment Resources.

Read more about our standards: How our tests are built and validated.

Sample items

  • "I keep my workspace tidy enough that I can find things at a glance."Illustrative Conscientiousness facet-style item (orderliness) - answered on a 5-point accuracy scale (not a scored item).
  • "I am usually the first to speak up when a group needs a direction."Illustrative Extraversion facet-style item (assertiveness, not a scored item).
  • "I am moved by poetry, art, or music more than most people I know."Illustrative Openness facet-style item (artistic interests, not a scored item).

Frequently asked questions

How is this different from the standard 50-item Big Five test?

It measures the same five traits but adds a second layer of detail. The 50-item form gives you one score per trait; this 120-item form resolves six narrow facets beneath each trait - 30 facets in total - so it can show which parts of a trait drive your score. Two people with identical Conscientiousness scores, for example, can have very different facet profiles, and only the facet-level form reveals that. Take the 50-item version for a reliable broad profile in about 15 minutes; take this one when you want to see inside the traits.

What are personality facets?

Facets are the narrower traits that make up each broad Big Five dimension. Conscientiousness, for instance, is not one thing: it combines orderliness, dutifulness, achievement-striving, self-discipline, and cautiousness, among others. Two people can reach the same overall Conscientiousness score by different routes - one orderly but relaxed about goals, another driven but messy. Facets let the report describe those differences instead of averaging them away.

Is this Big Five facet test free?

Yes. Taking the test is free, with no account required to start, and your free result shows your strongest of the five traits and its band, while the other four are named and covered in the report. The full report, free with an account, adds the full facet breakdown, with band-specific interpretation written against your specific trait and facet scores.

How long does the 120-item test take?

About 25 minutes. There are 120 statements, 24 for each of the five traits. There is no time pressure, and you can answer at your own pace; honest answers matter more than fast ones.

How reliable are the facet scores?

The five broad trait scores, each built from 24 items, are highly reliable. The individual facet scores are each estimated from four items, so they are less precise than the trait scores and are best read as directional indicators of where a trait’s weight sits rather than exact measurements. If you want the most reliable facet scores we offer, the 300-item version measures each facet with more items.

Who built this test?

The instrument uses the public-domain IPIP-NEO-120 developed by John A. Johnson from Lewis Goldberg’s International Personality Item Pool. The scoring and report were built and reviewed by Dr. Milos Kankaras, PhD psychometrician, whose background includes large-scale assessment work for the OECD, the EU, and UNESCO.

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