Skip to main content
Original Articles and Reviews

Five Big, Big Five Issues

Rationale, Content, Structure, Status, and Crosscultural Assessment

Published Online:https://doi.org/10.1027/1016-9040.3.2.113

This article discusses the rationale, content, structure, status, and cross-cultural assessment of the Big Five trait factors, focusing on topics of dispute and misunderstanding. Taxonomic restrictions of the original Big Five forerunner, the “Norman Five,” are discussed, and criticisms regarding the lexical hypothesis are refuted. The main issue of the psycholexical approach, namely, coverage of the trait domain, is elaborated upon, and the logic of the circumplexical structuring of the trait variables is summarized. A distinction is made between the common status of the Big Five approach, with a description of the competing positions of the Big Five model and other personality models, and the particular status of the Big Five approach, including its role as a general communication medium of personality traits. Finally, a review of recent, psychometrically based comparisons among different taxonomies is provided, lending support to the Big Five model as the main working hypothesis, on the one hand, but also showing discrepancies between languages, particularly as regards Factor V.

References

  • Allport, G. W. , Odbert, H. S. (1936). Trait-names: A psycholexical study. Psychological Monographs , 47, No. 211. First citation in articleGoogle Scholar

  • Austin, J. L. (1970). Philosophical papers. London: Oxford University Press. First citation in articleGoogle Scholar

  • Block, J. (1995). A contrarian view of the five-factor approach to personality description. Psychological Bulletin, 117, 187–215. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar

  • Bond, M. H. (1979). Dimensions of personality use in perceiving peers: Cross-cultural comparisons of Hong Kong, Japanese, American, and Filipino university students. International Journal of Psychology, 14, 47–56. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar

  • Brokken, F. B. (1978). The language of personality. Meppel, The Netherlands: Krips. First citation in articleGoogle Scholar

  • Caprara, G. V. , Perugini, M. (1994). Personality described by adjectives: Generalizability of the Big Five to the Italian lexical context. European Journal of Personality, 8, 357–369. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar

  • Cattell, R. B. (1943). The description of personality: Basic traits resolved into clusters. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 38, 476–507. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar

  • Cattell, R. B. (1945). The description of personality: Principles and findings in a factor analysis. American Journal of Psychology, 58, 69–90. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar

  • Church, A. T. , Katigbak, M. S. , Reyes, J. A. S. (1996). Toward a taxonomy of trait adjectives in Filipino: Comparing personality lexicons across cultures. European Journal of Personality, 10, 3–24. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar

  • Coan, R. W. (1972). Measurable components of openness to experience. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 39, 346. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar

  • Costa, P. T., Jr. , McCrae, R. R. (1976). Age differences in personality structure: A cluster analytic approach. Journal of Gerontology, 31, 564–570. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar

  • De Raad, B. (1992). The replicability of the Big Five personality dimensions in three word-classes of the Dutch language. European Journal of Personality, 6, 15–29. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar

  • De Raad, B. , Di Blas, L. , Perugini, M. (1998). Two independently constructed Italian trait taxonomies: Comparisons among Italian and between Italian and Germanic languages. European Journal of Personality, 12, 19–41. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar

  • De Raad, B. , Hendriks, A. A. J. , Hofstee, W. K. B. (1992). Towards a refined structure of personality traits. European Journal of Personality, 6, 301–319. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar

  • De Raad, B. , Hofstee, W. K. B. (1993). A circumplex approach to the five factor model: A facet structure of trait adjectives supplemented by trait verbs. Personality and Individual Differences, 15, 493–505. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar

  • De Raad, B. , Mulder, E. , Kloosterman, K. , Hofstee, W. K. B. (1988). Personality-descriptive verbs. European Journal of Personality, 2, 81–96. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar

  • De Raad, B. , Perugini, M. , Szirmák, Z. (1997). In pursuit of a cross-lingual reference structure of personality traits: Comparisons among five languages. European Journal of Personality, 11, 167–185. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar

  • De Raad, B. , Perugini, M. , Hrebícková, M. , Szarota, P. (1998). Lingua franca of personality: Taxonomies and structures based on the psycholexical approach. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 29, 212–232. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar

  • De Raad, B. , Van Heck, G. L. (1994). The fifth of the Big Five. Special Issue of the European Journal of Personality, 8, 225–356. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar

  • Di Blas, L. , Forzi, M. (1994). A further step towards the Italian taxonomy of personality descriptive terms.Unpublished manuscript. First citation in articleGoogle Scholar

  • Di Blas, L. , Forzi, M. (1997). Refining an Italian Trait Taxonomy by integrating simple and circumplex models: The abridged Big Three Circumplex Structure.Unpublished manuscript. First citation in articleGoogle Scholar

  • Digman, J. M. (1972). The structure of child personality as seen in behavioral ratings. In R. M. Dreger, (Ed.), Multivariate personality research . Baton Rouge: Claitors' Publishing. First citation in articleGoogle Scholar

  • Digman, J. M. , Takemoto-Chock, N. K. (1981). Factors in the natural language of personality: Re-analysis, comparison and interpretation of six major studies. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 16, 149–170. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar

  • Eysenck, H. J. (1992). The definition and measurement of Psychoticism. Personality and Individual Differences, 13, 757–785. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar

  • Fiske, D. W. (1949). Consistency of the factorial structures of personality ratings from different sources. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 44, 329–344. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar

  • Goldberg, L. R. (1976). Language and personality: Toward a taxonomy of trait descriptive terms. Istanbul Studies in Experimental Psychology, 12, 1–23. First citation in articleGoogle Scholar

  • Goldberg, L. R. (1981). Language and individual differences: the search for universals in personality lexicons. In L. Wheeler, (Ed.), Review of Personality and Social Psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 141–165). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. First citation in articleGoogle Scholar

  • Goldberg, L. R. (1982). From Ace to Zombie: some explorations in the language of personality. In C. D. Spielberger, J. N. Butcher, (Eds), Advances in personality assessment (Vol. 1, pp. 203–234). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. First citation in articleGoogle Scholar

  • Goldberg, L. R. (1990). An alternative “description of personality”: The Big-Five factor structure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 1216–1229. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar

  • Goldberg, L. R. (1993). The structure of phenotypic personality traits. American Psychologist, 48, 26–34. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar

  • Hendriks, A. A. J. (1997). The construction of the Five-Factor Personality Inventory (FFPI).Doctoral Dissertation, University of Groningen, The Netherlands. First citation in articleGoogle Scholar

  • Hofstee, W. K. B. , De Raad, B. (1991). Persoonlijkheidsstructuur: De AB5C-taxonomie van Nederlandse eigenschapstermen [Personality structure: The AB5C-taxonomy of Dutch traitterms]. Nederlands Tijdschrift voor de Psychologie, 46, 262–274. First citation in articleGoogle Scholar

  • Hofstee, W. K. B. , De Raad, B. , Goldberg, L. R. (1992). Integration of the Big Five and circumplex approaches to trait structure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 146–163. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar

  • Hofstee, W. K. B. , Kiers, H. A. L. , De Raad, B. , Goldberg, L. R. , Ostendorf, F. (1997). Comparison of Big-Five structures of personality traits in Dutch, English, and German. European Journal of Personality, 11, 15–31. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar

  • Hrebícková, M. (1995). The structural model of personality based on the lexical analysis: A Czech replication study of the Five-Factor Model based on a comprehensive taxonomy of personality-descriptive adjectives.Unpublished report, Institute of Psychology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Brno. First citation in articleGoogle Scholar

  • John, O. P. (1990). The Big Five factor taxonomy: Dimensions of personality in the natural language and in questionnaires. In L. A. Pervin, (Ed.), Handbook of personality: Theory and research (pp. 66–100). New York: Guilford. First citation in articleGoogle Scholar

  • John, O. P. , Angleitner, A. , Ostendorf, F. (1988). The lexical approach to personality: A historical review of trait taxonomic research. European Journal of Personality, 2, 171–203. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar

  • McCrae, R. R. (1994). Openness to experience: Expanding the boundaries of Factor V. European Journal of Personality, 8, 251–272. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar

  • Norman, W. T. (1963). Toward an adequate taxonomy of personality attributes: Replicated factor structures in peer nomination personality ratings. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 66, 573–583. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar

  • Norman, W. T. (1967). 2800 Personality trait descriptors: Normative operating characteristics for a university population.Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, MI. First citation in articleGoogle Scholar

  • Ostendorf, F. (1990). Sprache und Persönlichkeitsstruktur: Zur Validität des Fünf-Faktoren-Modells der Persönlichkeit [ Language and personality structure: Towards the validity of the Five-Factor Model of personality]. Regensburg, Germany: Roderer-Verlag. First citation in articleGoogle Scholar

  • Peabody, D. (1987). Selecting representative trait adjectives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 59–71. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar

  • Saucier, G. , Goldberg, L. R. (1996). The language of personality: Lexical perspectives on the Five-Factor Model. In J. S. Wiggins, (Ed.), The Five-Factor Model of Personality (pp. 21–50). New York: Guilford. First citation in articleGoogle Scholar

  • Sneath, P. H. A. , Sokal, R. R. (1973). Numerical taxonomy: The principles and practice of numerical classification. San Francisco: Freeman. First citation in articleGoogle Scholar

  • Strelau, J. , Angleitner, A. , Bantelmann, J. , Ruch, W. (1990). The Strelau Temperament Inventory Revised (STR-R): Theoretical considerations and scale development. European Journal of Personality, 4, 209–235. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar

  • Szarota, P. (1996). Taxonomy of the Polish personality-descriptive adjectives of the highest frequency of use. Polish Psychological Bulletin, 27, 343–351. First citation in articleGoogle Scholar

  • Szirmák, Z. , De Raad, B. (1994). Taxonomy and structure of Hungarian personality traits. European Journal of Personality, 8, 95–117. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar

  • Tupes, E. C. , Christal, R. E. (1961). Recurrent personality factors based on trait ratings.USAF ASD Technical Report, No. 61–97. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar

  • Wiggins, J. S. (1973). Personality and prediction: Principles of personality assessment. Reading: Addison-Wesley. First citation in articleGoogle Scholar

  • Zuckerman, M. (1994). An alternative Five Factor model of personality. In C. F. Halverson, G. A. Kohnstamm, R. P. Martin, (Eds.), The developing structure of temperament and personality from infancy to adulthood (pp. 53–68). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. First citation in articleGoogle Scholar

  • Zuckerman, M. , Kuhlman, D. M. , Camac, C. (1988). What lies beyond E and N? A factor analysis of scales believed to measure basic dimensions of personality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 96–107. First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar