The Five Factor Model Of Personality

Want to read the rest of this paper? Join Essayworld today to view this entire essay and over 50,000 other term papers

known as traits, are conceived of as continuous
dimensions. In general, trait theories assume that people vary simultaneously on
a number of personality factors. These traits are of both the conjunctive and
disjunctive form. Therefore, to understand a trait, it is necessary to
understand what a particular trait is and what type of behaviour is evidence of
that trait. (Atkinson et al., 1993). Five factor theorists are one set of trait
theorists. The claim of five factor theorists is that behaviour can be best
predicted and explained by measurement of five dominant personality factors. The
five factor theory is a fairly recent proposal and has its basis in earlier work,
which shall be discussed.

One of the statistical techniques most commonly used in the study of
personality is that of factor analysis:

By identifying groups of highly intercorrelated variables,
factor analysis enables us to determine how many underlying
factors are measured by a set ...

Get instant access to over 50,000 essays. Write better papers. Get better grades. Already a member? Login

were factor
analysed and 12 personality factors were found. However, 4 additional factors
were found by analysing self-ratings. Cattell concluded that, in the adult human,
16 personality factors were dominant.

Eyesenck, (1953, cited in Atkinson et al, 1993) was another major
theorist to use factor analysis. Although using the same basic approach as
Cattell, Eyesenck used a more discriminatory factor analysis which resulted in
far less than 16 factors. Eyesencks' major factors are introversion-
extroversion and neuroticism. These are believed to be ordinal factors and as
such, scores on each dimension are independent of one another. The majority of
future studies concluded that the ...

Succeed in your coursework without stepping into a library. Get access to a growing library of notes, book reports, and research papers in 2 minutes or less.

CITE THIS PAGE: