THE SEARCH FOR THE (BIG-5) IN A NON-INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGE - THE HUNGARIAN TRAIT STRUCTURE AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO THE EPQ AND THE PTS

Reservations about the universality of the Big Five trait dimensions concern the number of factors, interpretation, and relevance. Few original personality taxonomies have been constructed: for English (GOLDBERG, 1982), for Dutch (DE RAAD et al., 1988), and for German (OSTENDORF, 1990); cross-language validations with decisive meaning remained within this germanic language group. For a crucial test of the cross-cultural validity of the Five Factor Model, it is important to step outside the Indo-European languages to which the Germanic languages belong. Hungarian is such a language, and at present data for a Hungarian trait structure are available. A comprehensive list of personality descriptors (561 adjectives) from the Hungarian lexicon was used to obtain self-ratings from 400 subjects. In addition, data were obtained on the scales of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) and of the Pavlovian Temperament Survey (PT'S). The present results form an independent confirmation of the first four factors of the Big Five. The fifth factor remains somewhat elusive. EYSENCK'S P.E.N. scales and STRELAU'S temperament scales are used as standards for comparing the Hungarian factors. In particular, Extraversion and Neuroticism find support by their relationships to these scales

Taxonomy and structure of Hungarian personality traits

This study reports on the application of the principles of the lexical approach to a non-Indo-European language, namely Hungarian. This language is a Uralic island surrounded on all sides by Indo-European languages. In addition, the Hungarians are, in terms of cultural features, Europeans. These conditions pro vide a great opportunity for a crucial test case of the lexical approach to personality. Study 1 reports on the different phases of the selection of the trait terms from the Hungarian lexicon, a categorization into kinds of personality-relevant terms, a comparison of the category findings with those of other languages, and on indices of relevance of the personality terms. Of the total number of 8738 personality-relevant terms, 3914 adjectives were used for Study 2. In that study, personality descriptiveness ratings were obtained from a group of judges (N = 5). On the basis of these ratings, a manageable set of 624 adjectives was selected for a rating task. Four hundred subjects provided self-ratings on the 624 adjectives. On the basis of the means and standard deviations of the ratings, the set of 624 was further reduced to 561 adjectives. On ipsatized data, principal components analyses were performed Both a four-factor solution and a five-factor solution, which were Varimax-rotated, are presented The correspondence of these factors to the traditional Big Five factors is discussed

In pursuit of a cross-lingual reference structure of personality traits:Comparisons among five languages

Data sets from five original trait taxonomies from different languages, Dutch, Italian, Hungarian, American English, and German, are used for a cross-cultural study. Factor structures, presumably Big-Five structures, within these languages, based on ratings from about 400-800 subjects on approximately 500 trait variables per language, are used for comparison. The five five-factor structures are pairwise compared. To enable these comparisons, the best one-to-one translations of trait terms between the languages are used These translations yielded subsets of the data for direct comparisons. Congruence coefficients were calculated for the corresponding factors in the different languages, based on their independent positions, on their positions after target rotations, and on their positions after simultaneous rotations. The congruences show replicability of the first three factors of the Big Five across the Jive languages, and replicability of the fourth factor among Dutch, Italian, and Hungarian. Relatively high congruences between all five factors were found between Italian and Dutch. (C) 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd