How much is personality structure affected if one or more highest-level factors are first removed? A sequential factors approach

• 1–12 personality factors rotated with 0, 1, or 3 initial factors held constant.
• 636 student ratings on 435 adjectives and scores of 512 adults on 184 scales.
• Effects slight for initial factors held constant, modest for adjectives vs. scales.
• Results suggest that personality structure not strongly hierarchical.

Rotations of 1–12 factors were compared by Goldberg’s “bass-ackward” method, with or without initially holding constant one or more principal components. Two sets of data were employed: ratings by 320 undergraduates using 435 personality-descriptive adjectives, and 512 Oregon community members’ responses to 184 scales from 8 personality inventories. Holding constant none or one or three initial factors made relatively little difference to the resulting structure. On the whole, that structure was not strongly hierarchical: allowing an additional dimension usually resulted in a new substantive dimension rather than in the splitting of an old one.