LEXICAL APPROACH TO PERSONALITY .3. VERIF ICATION OF THE BIG-5

Up to now, the ''Big Five'' approach to personality has been verified at several levels. The authors of this study are concerned with the in tercultural comparison of the occurrence of five factors of the person ality description in different languages, the ''Big Five'' in relation to other structural models and personality questionnaires, with the f ive-factor model application to practice and with its critics. Five fa ctors, originally identified in English, are nowadays confirmed in Dut ch, German, Italian, Russian and Chinese, and in the A'are and Orissa languages, too. Concerning Hungarian, Polish and Czech, the research h as been already started. In the article, the authors compare briefly t he ''Big Five'' with other structural models and present an attempt at integrating the dimensional model of personality description with the circular model. The five-factor structure of personality description is searched for among the items of the personality questionnaires. A q uestionnaire has been also constructed that measures the separate dime nsions of the ''Big Five''. Recently, the ''Big Five'' approach is use d even in the application spheres of psychology, e.g. in the work coun selling, in clinical practice, in phorensic psychology. The critics is led not only by psychologists who do not share the conviction of the universal validity of the five factors; the ''Big Five'' followers hav e also got reserveations concerning the method of the factor analysis itself, the selection and taxonomy of the personality relevant terms, the number and interpretation of particular factors, as well as the th eoretical starting-points.