Costa and McCrae and the Big Five Factors current consensus - is that there are 5 primary factors of personality.

The “Big Five” model N E O A C (can spell ocean) was developed to capture the traits that are “most important” in people’s lives.

Goldstein - credits Galton with first recognizing the importance of the “fundamental lexical hypothesis.”....

....“The most important individual differences in human transactions will come to be encoded as single terms in some or all of the world’s languages."

Paul Costa and Robert McCrae - created the NEO-PI-R questionnaire which assess the big five personality traits.

The NEO-PI-R appears to agree with (be consistent with) both the EPQ (Eysenck) and 16pf (Cattell). Age changes and the NEO-PI-R - Neuroticism and extraversion decrease with age. Agreeableness and conscientiousness increase with age.

Walter Mischel and the “situationist position” Situationists like Mischel argue that the extent to which traits control behavior is highly exaggerated....

....It is “situations” that really control and predict behavior.

Consistency - the trait situationist debate centers around: 1.cross situational consistency. and 2.longitudinal consistency.

Personality traits, in general, do tend to be stable across both time and situations.