describe their students (Digman & Inouye, 1986; Goldberg, 2001). The five
factors also emerge in studies with elementary school children (Markey,Markey, Tinsley, & Ericksen, 2002; Measelle, John, Ablow, Cowan, &
Cowan, 2005) and appear to be fairly stable over time (Terracciano, Costa, &
McCrae, 2006; Vaidya, Gray, Haig, & Watson, 2002). One team of research-
ers used college student interview and questionnaire data from 1939 –1944 to
determine Big Five scores (Soldz & Vaillant, 1999). These scores correlatedhighly with Big Five test scores taken when the participants were 45 yearsolder. In short, evidence from many different sources indicates that the many
traits comprising our personalities can be organized along five basic personality
dimensions.
Criticism and Limitations of the Big Five Model
Although research on the five-factor model has produced impressively consis-tent findings and an unusually high level of agreement among personality re-searchers, the model is not without its critics. First, there is some debate about
what the five factors mean (Digman, 1989; Digman & Inouye, 1986; Westen,
1996). For example, these factors may simply represent five dimensions built
into our language. That is, although personality may in reality have a very dif-
ferent structure, our ability to describe personality traits is limited to the adjec-
tives available to us, which may fall into five primary categories. It also may bethe case that our cognitive ability to organize information about ourselves and
others is limited to these five dimensions. Thus, although people may describe
personality as if all traits can be subsumed under five factors, this model maynot accurately capture the complexities and subtleties of human personality.
In response to these concerns, many researchers have looked at the struc-
ture of personality among people who speak languages other than English(McCrae et al., 2004, 2005a, 2005b). Although a few exceptions to the rule
are found, the results from numerous studies indicate that the five-factor
model does not merely reflect the structure of the English language but ap-pears to be a universal pattern for describing personality.
Second, there remains some disagreement about the structure of the five-
factor model (Ashton, Lee, Goldberg, & de Vries, 2009). Some factor analyticstudies find patterns that do not fit well within the five-factor structure
(Block, 1995; Lee, Ogunfowora, & Ashton, 2005). Researchers sometimes
find three or four factors, and sometimes six or seven (Ashton & Lee, 2007;
Church & Burke, 1994; Simms, 2007; Zhou, Saucier, Gao, & Liu, 2009;
Zuckerman, Kuhlman, Joireman, Teta, & Kraft, 1993). Hans Eysenck, whose
work is described in Chapter 9, promoted a model of personality with three
main factors. This confusion has led some psychologists to refer to “The Big
Five, plus or minus two” (Briggs, 1989).
Some of the confusion about the number of personality dimensions goes
back to the question of what kind of data to include in the factor analysis
(McCrae & Costa, 1995). For example, most studies finding five factors do
not include traits that are evaluative, such as special orimmoral . When these
terms are included, researchers sometimes find two additional personality fac-
tors. Investigators sometimes refer to this new factor structure as the “Big
Seven ”(Almagor, Tellegen, & Waller, 1995; Benet-Martinez & Waller,Factor Analysis and the Search for the Structure of Personality 163