The Big Seven Factor Model of Personality Description: Evidence for Its Cross-Cultural Generality in a Spanish Sample

The discovery of the Big Seven factor model of natural language personality description ( Tellegen, 1993 ; Tellegen & Waller, 1987 ; Waller, in press ; Waller & Zavala, 1993 ) challenges the comprehensiveness of the Big Five factor structure. To establish the robustness and cross-cultural generalizability of the seven-factor model, a Big Seven ( Tellegen, Grove & Waller, 1991 ) and a Big Five ( John, Donahue, & Kentle, 1991 ) questionnaire were administered to 2 samples: (a) a sample of 569 community-dwelling volunteers from the United States and (b) a sample of 435 Spanish native speakers from Spain. Factor structures from the self- and peer-ratings on the Spanish version of the Big Seven questionnaire largely replicated the American structure ( Waller, in press ). Nevertheless, some psychologically meaningful item-level differences emerged. These differences suggest that Spaniards attach negative and positive values to self-other perceptions of introversion and unconventionality, respectively. Our findings support the cross-cultural robustness of the Big Seven factors and the advantages of this structure for studying culturally specific differences in personality trait-term evaluations.