PSYC 2P25 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Trait Theory, Lexical Hypothesis, Factor Analysis
9 Nov 2012
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Document Summary
When assessing people"s personalities, it isn"t feasible to measure all traits reliably, it would take too long. But, if you decide to measure only a few traits, some of them might be very similar and you might completely miss a lot of important traits. But if we could categorize personality traits into a few groups of related traits, then we could assess a few traits from each group and thereby summarize people"s personalities thoroughly and efficiently. Finding basic trait categories would also help to organize research on personality (every researcher would measure similar set of traits) and [maybe] give clues about the causes and functions of personality itself. How to identify the basic trait categories: examine correlations among many traits and find a few (unrelated) groups of strongly correlated traits: Numbers show how clearly variables belong to that factor. High loading on factor means high rs with other variables in same factor.
