Resumen de The general factor of personality: : A general critique

William Revelle, Joshua Wilt

• 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:

  1.

  The first factor or component of a correlation or covariance matrix.

  2.

  The first factor resulting from a bifactor rotation or biquartimin transformation.

  3.

  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.