Taxometric analyses of higher-order personality domains

- An untested assumption is that the “big five” personality domains are dimensional traits.
- Validating the dimensional latent structures of these five domains is justified.
- Whether these were dimensional or categorical was examined with taxometric analysis.
- Results supported dimensional latent structures resulted across three samples and measures.
- Implications of these findings for personality and psychopathology were discussed.

The “big five” taxonomy, also called the five factor model, is a framework for personality that is ubiquitous in the literature of psychology. This organization is composed of five personality domains, Neuroticism (N), Extraversion (E), Conscientiousness (C), Openness to Experience (O), and Agreeableness (A). The accepted, but largely unexamined, assumption is that these personality domains are traits with dimensional latent structures. We carried out taxometric analyses on the five core domain because there have been no comprehensive latent structural analyses of all five and because the practice of discretizing continuous “big five” data is not uncommon. Data were from three large (Ns = 857, 1280, and 9935) undergraduate and community samples that competed one of three different measures of the “big five” (BFI, NEO PI-R, or Big Five Factor Inventory). Generally, results supported dimensional latent structures for each of the five domains and were largely convergent across measures and samples. We discuss the importance of empirically validating the underlying structure of these personality traits and the implications and importance that our findings have for personality and psychopathology.