Developing the Measures of the Eight Elemental Traits

Abstract

Chapter 3 presents the empirical development of the scales to measure the eight elemental traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeability, neuroticism/stability, material needs, arousal needs, and physical needs. The chapter first provides an overview of previous efforts to identify a set of basic personality traits. It next presents two pilot studies that were employed to initially develop the scales. The results of five studies used to confirm the scales are then presented. In these studies confirmatory factor analysis was used to refine the scales and identify a short set of items for each construct that possesses good internal reliability. The results revealed a coherent set of eight scales possessing excellent scale properties.