Refining a descriptive structure of personality attributes in the Italian language: The abridged Big Three circumplex structure.

Factor structure and circumplex approaches were integrated to develop a refined structure of personality attributes in Italian. In Study I, the factor analytic approach was applied on the data set. The 3-factor solution, resembling the Big Three, was the most stable among others; the Big Five were not replicated. In Study 2, it was verified that differences in language and culture were relevant for the failure of the Big Five in Italian. In Study 3, the 3-factor solution was developed into 3 circumplexes, thus generating the abridged Big Three circumplex (AB3C) structure. Each 2-factor space had circumplex properties. In Study 4, the AB3C structure was shown to account for relevant proportions of variance in most of the scales of 4 well-established measures of personality. Finding indicate that the AB3C structure provides a parsimonious representation of the conceptual organization of most of the personality attributes.