`   Harkenbane:  Your question isn't that simple.  On the one hand, if you do research using an instrument such as the 16PF, yes, you do ``replicate`` the factor structure.  For example, when the researchers at IPAT wrote hundreds of brand new 16PF items during the development of the 16PF, administered them to hundreds of volunteers, and then performed exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses... Yes, the factors were confirmed. Both in factor-analyses of the new scales and in analyses of the old and new forms.  But the same is true of the NEO with it's 30 facets and Hogam's HPI with it's dozens of HIC's.  So if you mean, ``Do researchers agree on any breakdown of the five broad factors?`` then no.  Since the choice of factors is somewhat arbitrary, there is no reason to expect that they would agree.  But my point are that: (1) the big five is far too broad, so (2) virtually all commercial personality tests have adopted this two-stage model and (3) I have seen evidence (like Lew Goldberg's unpublished ``Comparitive validity`` chapter) that convinces me that these facets have significantly higher validity than the broad traits, even after you account for the different numbers of predictors (by using empirical cross-validation, in the case of Lew's chapter).  Goldberg's chapter actually found that the 16PF factors were most predictive of all factorial models (e.g., NEO-5, NEO-30, Hogan-6, Hogan-36, etc.)  And I guess your also asking whether anyone has done the same things Cattell did and gotten the same results.  That's not as cut-and-dried as you suggest.  AFAIK, only one replication has been attempted (by Norman?) and it's true, he didn't find the same results.  But one contrary finding does not constitute a stunning refutation and I'd argue that Norman's different findings could easily reflect that exploratory factor analysis is a poor way to replicable factors.  There are far too many judgments required (like **how many factors to extract** which is absoluetly **not** a solved problem).   `