Does the Five Factor Model of Personality Provide a Comprehensive Coverage of Individual Differences?

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Does the Five Factor model of personality provide a comprehensive (all-inclusive/ broad) coverage of individual differences? Include in your answer a consideration of the disagreements over the fifth factor. Personality refers to individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving (Larsen & Buss,2010) and the study of personality broadly focuses on two areas; understanding individual differences and understanding how the various parts of a person come together as a whole. Personality traits are characteristic behaviours, thoughts and feelings of an individual that tend to occur across diverse situations and are relatively stable over time (Larsen & Buss,2010). The search for a standard taxonomy, or organising structure of personality traits, has driven personality research for the past decades. A personality taxonomy should provide a systematic framework for distinguishing, ordering, and naming types and characteristics of individuals and would help us understand the dimensions of difference between people and help explain and predict human behaviour (John & Srivastava,1999). Using language, the natural basis of description, numerous trait taxonomies have been developed over the years, and although some disagreement remains, the Five Factor Model (FFM) is currently the dominant perspective on the organisation of personality traits. This essay will evaluate the extent to which the FFM provides a comprehensive coverage of individual differences. The Five Factor Model was originally based on a combination of the lexical approach and the statistical approach. According to the lexical theory all traits listed and defined in the dictionary form the basis of the natural way of describing differences between people and synonym frequency is the measure of importance of a trait (Larsen & Buss,1999). The statistical approach

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