Psychometric Properties of Brief Version of Pathological Narcissism Inventory

Narcissistic personality disorder is one of the disorders that has many different manifestations in clinical and research environments that make it difficult to diagnose and treat this disorder.The aim of this study was evaluating the validity and reliability of the brief version of pathological narcissism (B-PNI) in Iranian society.

This was a descriptive correlation study and the study sample was composed of 400 university students who were selected by available sampling. After getting author’s agreement, the main version of Brief Pathological Narcissism Inventory was translated through backward translation technique and the scale was used for pilot test on 50 people. Convergent validity was calculated using the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI-16). 

Confirmatory factor analysis on grandiose narcissism and narcissistic vulnerable narcissism indicated good validity of the inventory in these factors (after deleting one item). Composite Reliability of the subscales ranged from 0.68 to 0.83. The Cronbach’s alpha coefficients obtained for this scale and its subscales from 0.63 to 0.83. This scale showed a good test-retest reliability in 15 days(r=0.984, p=0.001). Grandiose subscale just has shown the convergent validity with Narcissism personality Inventory(r=0.4, p=0.001) and there was not a meaningful correlation with Vulnerable narcissism(r=0.07, p= 0.6). 

The Farsi version of the Brief Pathological Narcissism Inventory has a desirable validity and reliability and could be used in clinical activities and so in psychological researches in Iran.