As far as I know, there are no personality tests constructed in the proper way, which would be to give a lot of questions and then perform either factor analysis or PCA on the answers in order to discover from the data what the true dimensions of personality are.
PCA as used in psychology basically tells you that you’re asking the same question in a subtly different way, it has nothing to do with this being important. If you include many variants of the same question in your test, you will get exactly what you wanted in results of PCA.
PCA as used in psychology basically tells you that you’re asking the same question in a subtly different way, it has nothing to do with this being important. If you include many variants of the same question in your test, you will get exactly what you wanted in results of PCA.
True. It relies on your asking a “random sample” of questions.
And if we use lack of correlation between questions as indicator of their randomness, PCA won’t give us any factors at all for truly random ones.
That’s one of the reasons I don’t have any faith in the Big Five Personality Traits.