PSYCH 1 Chapter Notes - Chapter 15: Conscientiousness, Pessimism, Heritability
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A trait is a relatively stable disposition to behave in a certain way. Traits are part of person and not environment. Traits describe differences among people in their tendencies to behave in certain ways. The goal of any trait theory of personality is to specify a manageable set of distinct personality dimensions that can be used to summarize the fundamental psychological differences among individuals. Factor analysis as a tool for identifying an efficient set of traits. Factor analysis is a method of analyzing patterns of correlations in order to extract mathematically defined factors, which underlie and help make sense of those patterns. First step in factor-analytic study is to collect data. Once the data is collected, the researcher statistically correlates the scores for each adjective with those for each of the other adjectives, using correlation. Next step is factor extraction, in which items that are strongly related to one another cluster together and are identified.