Validating the Structure of Narcissism: A Replication and Extension of Crowe et al. (2019)

Narcissism is a personality construct linked to dysfunction in several domains that includes grandiose and vulnerable dimensions. Recently, researchers have further explicated the multifaceted structure of narcissism (Krizan & Herlache, 2018; Miller et al., 2016, 2017) by empirically uncovering its underlying facets: agentic extraversion, antagonism, and neuroticism (Krizan & Herlache, 2018; Miller et al., 2016, 2017). Crowe et al. (2019) took an empirical approach to examine the structure of narcissism using items from commonly used narcissism measures. The current study sought to replicate and extend this study in a smaller, possibly impoverished, subset of these narcissism measure items to see if that factor structure still holds. Using an online community sample (N = 473), a subset of narcissism items was submitted to a series of factor analyses. This smaller item pool successfully replicated the factor structure of narcissism found by Crowe et al. (2019) at both the two- and three-factor level. These findings confer additional evidence for the validity and robustness of the trifurcated structure of narcissism.