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The general factor of personality: A general critique
Open accessAbstract
Recently, it has been proposed that all non-cognitive measures of personality share a general factor of personality. A problem with many of these studies is a lack of clarity in defining a general factor. In this paper we address the multiple ways in which a general factor has been identified and argue that many of these approaches find factors that are not in fact general. Through the use of artificial examples, we show that a general factor is not: The first factor or component of a correlation or covariance matrix. The first factor resulting from a bifactor rotation or biquartimin transformation Necessarily the result of a confirmatory factor analysis forcing a bifactor solution We consider how the definition of what constitutes a general factor can lead to confusion, and we will demonstrate alternative ways of estimating the general factor saturation that are more appropriate.
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Cited by
Müllensiefen, D., Gingras, B., Musil, J., & Stewart, L. (2014) · PLoS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0089642 · Cited by 1,155
DeYoung, C. G. (2015) · Journal of Research in Personality · doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2014.07.004 · Cited by 1,057
All for One and One for All: Mental Disorders in One Dimension
Caspi, A., & Moffitt, T. E. (2018) · American Journal of Psychiatry · doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.2018.17121383 · Cited by 918
The general factor of psychopathology
Smith, G. T., Atkinson, E. A., Davis, H. A., Riley, E. N., & Oltmanns, J. R. (2020) · Annual Review of Clinical Psychology · doi:10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-071119-115848 · Cited by 195
Murray, A. L., Eisner, M., & Ribeaud, D. (2016) · Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology · doi:10.1007/s10802-016-0132-1 · Cited by 192
Metadata
- Authors
- Revelle, W., & Wilt, J.
- Venue
- Journal of Research in Personality
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2013-10
- Volume
- 47
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 493-504
- ISSN
- 0092-6566 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2025843993
- Cited by
- 254
- References
- 82
- FWCI
- 18.13
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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