Recurrent Personality Factors Based on Trait Ratings

Intercorrelations among ratings on 35 personality traits, selected as representative of the personality domain, were obtained for eight samples. These samples differed in length of acquaintanceship from 3 days to more than a year; in kind of acquaintanceship from assessment programs in a military training course to a fraternity house situation; in type of subject from airmen with only a high-school education to male and female undergraduate students to first-year graduate students; and in type of rater from very naive persons to clinical psychologists and psychiatrists with years of experience in the evaluation of personality. Centroid or multiple-group factors were extracted and rotated orthogonally to simple structure. For one study, an independent solution was obtained in which analytic rotations were accomplished on an IBM 650 computer using Kaiser's normal varimax criterion. Five fairly strong and recurrent factors emerged from each analysis, labeled as (a) Surgency, (b) Agreeableness, (c) Dependability, (d) Emotional Stability, and (e) Culture.