232 Structures of Personality Traits
constitutive operation of the paradigm, if only because the
number of five dimensions is intimately connected with it.
The merits or demerits of PCA as such (if that problem makes
sense at all) are not in order here. Clearly, however, other
methods—notably, methods advocated under the label of
person-oriented approach—yield concepts of personality that
differ from the 5-D trait paradigm.
A fourth set of operations contains models for structur-
ing, interpreting, and communicating trait information. The
major rivals are the hierarchical and the circumplex models
of personality structure. Their common point of departure
is simple structure. On the one hand, simple structure is a
primitive case of the circumplex in that trait variables are
assigned to the factor on which they load highest, thus, to
circle segments that are 90 deg wide with the factor poles
as bisectrices. On the other, simple structure may be
viewed as a primitive case of hierarchical structure con-
taining two levels: factors at the top and trait variables at
the bottom. But from there on, ways separate. I judge
structure models by their capacity to produce clear and
communicable trait concepts; their underlying mechanics,
however, should be allowed to be intricate and may stretch
the mind.
After discussing the structure models that have been pro-
posed or implied in the 5-D context, I conclude with sketch-
ing a family of models that may serve as a base for capturing
personality structure. It consists of a hierarchy of generalized
semicircumplexes, with one generalpcomponent of person-
ality at the top, and including two-dimensional circumplex,
giant three, 5-D, and other dimensional structures. The joint
structure responds to the greatest challenge in personality as-
sessment, which is to deal with its dominating evaluative
component in a realistic manner.
CONSTRUCTING PERSONALITY
THROUGH QUESTIONNAIRES
Under the 5-D paradigm, what does it mean to say that a per-
son is extraverted? In the typical case, it means that this in-
dividual has given answers to a number of standard
questions regarding himself or herself and that these answers
have been summarized into a score under the hopefully
adequate label of extraversion—rather than, for example,
surgency or sociability, which are related but not the same.
This is not to suggest that a ready alternative to the question-
naire approach is available; rather, it functions as a tacit pre-
supposition in trait psychology taken generally. However,
there is an obvious alternative to the individual himself
or herself as a responder, namely, others who know the per-
son well.The Hegemony of QuestionnairesThe association between personality and questionnaires is
not merely a matter of fashion or a historical coincidence. To
assess someone’s personality, we have to ask questions about
it—to the person himself or herself, to third parties who know
the person well, to expert observers. Between the investigator
or practitioner on the one hand and the person on the other,
there is an indispensable assessor. So-called behavior obser-
vations, for example, are not objective in the way they would
be if behavior recordings were translated into a score without
the intervention of an observer; they represent answers to
questions put to a human assessor. Moving from asking ques-
tions to applying a questionnaire is a small step: A systematic
approach to personality requires standard questions, and thus
a questionnaire. Using an unstructured interview, for exam-
ple, means obtaining answers to an imperfectly standardized
set of questions.
One seeming exception is self-report, in which person and
assessor coincide. Failure to distinguish between the two
roles, however, would amount to denying that the assessor
could be someone else, thereby abandoning personality as an
intersubjective phenomenon. Another more interesting ap-
parent exception to questionnaire use is expert clinical diag-
nosis, in which practitioner and assessor coincide. In the first
place, however, that process may be reconstructed in part as
giving answers to more or less standardized questions about
the person that the diagnostician has learned to ask to himself
or herself. Second and more fundamental, the diagnostician
could have been another individual. By virtue of that
exchangeability, a case can be made for maximizing the
intersubjective character of diagnoses. Actually using a stan-
dardized set of questions (e.g., a personality questionnaire
phrased in the third person singular) to guide and articulate
one’s diagnostic impressions would contribute to that end.
This is not to deny the heuristic element in clinical diagnosis,
or in any other applied setting, but to document the central
place of asking questions to third persons in the systematic
study of personality.
The reason for the primacy of questionnaires may of
course be sought in a tendency of students of personality to
take things easy: There is nothing more convenient than giv-
ing a self-report questionnaire to a client or applicant. But
more valid reasons may be brought forward. There is a tension
between the concepts of “test” and “personality.” Surely, we
may decide to assess a person’s typical intelligent behavior by