Five Factor Personality Theory

TIt is important to note here that the terms Norman used along with his numerals were I: Extraversion/Surgency, II: Agreeableness, III: Conscientiousness, -IV: Emotional Stability and V: Culture. While these terms are often still used in the five factor personality theory, the eventual emergence of the more commonly used and understood terms in the field related to Norman’s IV and V positions are ‘Neuroticism’ and ‘Openness to Experience’; these terms are related to the convergence of research done within the lexical approach and the questionnaire approach.

The Questionnaire Approach

Personality research and theory has and largely still relies mostly on the self-report instrument of the questionnaire for the information that guides it. It

Two of the most recognized names in the arena of five-factor personality theory are Paul Costa and Robert McCrae, because of their substantive contributions to the researching and defining of measureable broad scale personality factors, as well as sub-facet traits related to each of the main five factors. They published their NEO Personality Inventory (1985) measuring Neuroticism (N), Extraversion (E) and Openness to Experience (O) after analyzing Cattell’s 16PF, and eventually more and more similarities amongst researchers became known. The recurrence of the N and E dimensions of personality in a wide variety of instruments over years of psychiatric research was the beginning of solidifying a unified theory of personality measurement. The lexical and questionnaire traditions eventually merged into what is the contemporary FFM because of

This is due to the underlying need in all psychological research for appealing, accessible simplification that can lead to useful generalization. As factor analysts continued along the lexical convention they were able to find correlation across languages; the 4500 trait terms found in English matched highly with German, Japanese and Chinese lexicons, attesting to the universal importance of defining personality and speaking to our human instinct to classify personality traits (John & Srivastava, 1999). Today, researchers are still examining the extent to which the Big Five structure generalizes across