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.