Quotes

The Five-Factor Model--A New Paradigm:

Comments on the Big Five from Scholarly Journals

(Updated 9-8-2003)

“Among personality psychologists there is a rapidly growing consensus that the domain of individual differences in adulthood, as measured by rating scales and questionnaire items, is almost completely described by five broad factors....”

-Halverson, C.F., Jr., Kohnstamm, G.A., & Martin, R.P. (1994). The Developing Structure of Temperament and Personality from Infancy to Adulthood. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

“The five-factor model of personality is still the most noteworthy topic in the literature.”

-Jerry S. Wiggins & Aaron L. Pincus, Annual Review of Psychology, 1992, p. 406.

“NEO-PI validation research has been impressive...any study that purports to be addressing fundamental dimensions of personality should include the NEO-PI as a measure.”

-Thomas A. Widiger. Review of the NEO Personality Inventory. In J.J. Kramer & J.C. Conoley (Eds.) The 11th Mental Measurement Yearbook, pp. 605-606.

"The major aim of this article has been to provide sufficient evidence to alleviate any qualms about the generality of the Big-Five structure. To this end, findings were presented to demonstrate factor robustness within a near-comprehensive set of 1,431 trait adjectives across a wide variety of factor-analytic procedures... In no case was any additional factor of any substantial size, and in Study 2 no additional factor demonstrated any significant amount of across-sample generality."

-Lewis R. Goldberg, University of Oregon and Oregon Research Institute, Eugene. "An Alternative 'Description of Personality': The Big-Five Structure." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1990, 59(6), 1216-1229.

"In order for any field of science to advance, it is necessary to have an accepted classification scheme for accumulating and categorizing empirical findings. We believe that the robustness of the 5-factor model provides a meaningful framework for formulating and testing hypotheses relating individual differences in personality to a wide range of criteria in personnel psychology, especially in the subfields of personnel selection, performance appraisal, and training and development.".

--Murray R. Barrick & Michael K. Mount, Dept. of Management and Organizations, University of Iowa. "The Big Five Personality Dimensions and Job Performance: A Meta-Analysis." Personnel Psychology, 1991, 44, 1-26.

"The past decade has witnessed a rapid convergence of views regarding the structure of the concepts of personality.... It now appears quite likely that what Norman (1963) offered many years ago as an effort 'toward an adequate taxonomy for personality attributes' has matured into a theoretical structure of surprising generality.... [The] hope that the method of factor analysis would bring a clarity to the domain of personality...seems close to realization."

--John M. Digman, Dept. of Psychology, University of Hawaii at Manoa. "Personality Structure: Emergence of the Five-Factor Model." Annual Review of Psychology, 1990, 41. 417-440.

"The comprehensive analyses in Dutch have provided so far the strongest cross-language evidence for the Big Five. Results from a study of English-German bilinguals indicate that the Big Five form internally consistent and relatively independent dimensions in German as well.... Finally, factor analyses of translations of Norman's...20 scales have replicated the Big Five in Japanese...."

-Oliver P. John, University of California at Berkeley, & Alois Angleitner & Fritz Ostendorf, Universität Bielefeld, Germany. "The Lexical Approach to Personality: A Historical Review of Trait Taxonomic Research." European Journal of Personality,1988, 2, 171-203.

"A series of research studies of personality traits has led to a finding consistent enough to approach the status of law. The finding is this: If a large number of rating scales is used and if the scope of the scales is very broad, the domain of personality descriptors is almost completely accounted for by five robust factors."

-J.M. Digman & J. Inouye. "Further Specification of the Five Robust Factors of Personality." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1986, 50, 116-123.

"The past decade has witnessed an electrifying burst of interest in the most fundamental problem of the field--the search for a scientifically compelling taxonomy of personality traits. More importantly, the beginning of a consensus is emerging about the general framework of such a taxonomic representation. As a consequence, the scientific study of personality dispositions, which had been cast into the doldrums in the 1970s, is again an intellectually vigorous enterprise poised on the brink of a solution to a scientific problem whose roots extend back at least to Aristotle.... It should be clear that proponents of the five-factor model have never intended to reduce the rich tapestry of personality to a mere five traits. Rather, they seek to provide a scientifically compelling framework in which to organize the myriad individual differences that characterize humankind.... It might be argued that the hallmark of a compelling structural model is that it is initially disliked; thereby stimulating numerous attempts to replace it with something more attractive--all of which fail. In any case, so it has been with the Big Five model of perceived personality trait descriptors. Most of the present proponents of the model were once its critics, and some of its present critics contributed to its success."

-Lewis R. Goldberg, University of Oregon and Oregon Research Institute, Eugene. "The Structure of Phenotypic Personality Traits." American Psychologist, January 1993, 48(1), 26-34.

"In the personality sphere..., I again anticipate more extensive use by tomorrow's practitioners of new generations of inventories, for example, the NEO Personality Inventory developed by Costa and McCrae (1988) for the assessment in healthy individuals of something akin to today's five basic dimensions of character and personality that have evolved empirically from a line of inquiry first suggested by Galton a century ago."

-Joseph D. Matarazzo, Oregon Health Sciences University. "Psychological Testing and Assessment in the 21st Century." American Psychologist, August 1992, 47(8), 1007-1018.

"Personality psychologists who continue to employ their preferred measure without locating it within the five-factor model can only be likened to geographers who issue reports of new lands but refuse to locate them on a map for others to find.”

-D.J. Ozer & S.P. Reise, “Personality Assessment,”Annual Review of Psychology 1994, 45, 357-388.