PERSISTENCE - AN INDEPENDENT FACTOR OF THE TRIDIMENSIONAL PERSONALITY QUESTIONNAIRE

The Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire was developed by Cloninger to measure three primary dimensions of Novelty Seeking, Harm Avoidance, and Reward Dependence. However, Cloninger and his colleagues have more recently posited that Persistence, a subscale of the Reward Dependence dimension, be regarded as an independent dimension of temperament. The present purpose was to provide independent evidence of the status of Persistence, testing an ethnically diverse sample of 428 college students. The dimensional structure of the Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire was examined with a series of principal components analyses on the subscales. Persistence clearly emerged as the major component of a fourth independent factor. Implications of the results are discussed.