Factor Analysis of Personality Measures
William F. Chaplin · Encyclopedia of Statistics in Behavioral Science · 2005
Abstract Factor analysis refers to a broad array of statistical models and techniques that have the general goal of describing underlying patterns in relational data. A common application of factor analysis is to items that assess personality, with the goal of identifying the major dimensions of human personality. These dimensions may be viewed as descriptive or causal depending upon the views of the investigator, and different numbers and types of dimensions have been proposed. Subjective decisions about the items to include in the analysis, the method of factor identification (principle components or principle factors), the number of factors, the rotation of the factors, and the interpretation of the factors all contribute to the diversity of the results obtained with different factor analyses. The goal of factor analysis is generally to simplify the complex structure of human personality, not to fully model that complexity. Thus, recent results from the application of confirmatory factor analysis to personality data that indicate that established factor models do not adequately model all the covariation among personality measures are neither surprising nor particularly relevant.