The Big Seven factor model of personality description: Evidence for its cross-cultural generality in a Spanish sample.

Abstract

The discovery of the Big Seven factor model of natural language personality description (Tellegen, 1993 ; Tellegen & Waller, 1987 ; Waller in press ; Waller & Zavala, 1993) challenges the comprehensiveness of the Big Five factor structure. To establish the robustness and cross-cultural generalizability of the seven-factor model, a Big Seven (Tellegen, Grove & Waller, 1991) and a Big Five (John, Donahue, & Kentle, 1991) questionnaire were administered to 2 samples : (a) a sample of 569 community-dwelling volunteers from the United States and (b) a sample of 435 Spanish native speakers from Spain. Factor structures from the self- and peer-ratings on the Spanish version of the Big Seven questionnaire largely replicated the American structure (Waller, in press). Nevertheless, some psychologically meaningful item-level differences emerged. These differences suggest that Spaniards attach negative and positive values to self-other perceptions of introversion and unconventionality, respectively. Our findings support the cross-cultural robustness of the Big Seven factors and the advantages of this structure for studying culturally specific differences in personality traitterm evaluations.

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