Exploring network structure and central items of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory

Abstract

Objectives: The aim of this work is to explore the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) using network analysis in a dataset of 942 university students from the French-speaking part of Belgium. Methods: We estimated an Ising Model for the forty items in the questionnaire and explored item interconnectedness with strength centrality. We provide in the supplementary materials the dataset used for the analyses as well as the full code to ensure the reproducibility of our results. Results: The NPI is presented as an overall positively connected network with items from entitlement, authority and superiority reporting the highest centrality estimates. Conclusions: Network analysis highlights new properties of items from the NPI. Future studies should endeavor to replicate our findings in other samples, both clinical and non-clinical.