Taxonomy and structure of Croatian personality‐descriptive adjectives

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a comprehensive taxonomy of Croatian personality‐descriptive terms, organized in three studies. In the first study three judges searched through a standard dictionary of the Croatian language for person‐descriptive terms. In the second study, personality‐descriptive adjectives were classified by seven judges into 13 different categories of descriptors. In the third study, the 483 adjectives that the majority of judges in the second study classified as dispositions were rated for self‐descriptions by 515 University of Zagreb students and for peer‐descriptions by 513 students' best acquaintances. Self‐ and peer ratings were factor analysed separately and the Croatian emic lexical factors from both data sets were interpreted to be similar to the Big‐Five factors: Agreeableness, Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Intellect, and Emotional Stability. The inspection of factor content of the Croatian emic factors and their relation to imported Big‐Five measures revealed high correspondences for all five Croatian factors although the relation between the Croatian and the imported factors of Emotional Stability and Agreeableness was somewhat more complex. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.