[4][8] As an advanced graduate student at Michigan, Goldberg met Warren T. Norman, a new assistant professor, who became a lifelong friend and collaborator on issues in personality structure and assessment.
This was an important contribution suggesting that the "Big Five" factors of peer ratings could be identified in adjectives representing a sample of the lexicon.
Subsequent work on the lexical hypothesis, in collaboration with two prominent Dutch scholars, suggested that the structure could be seen as a set of circumplexes embedded in five dimensional spaces.
Validity data for these scales comes from a longitudinal sample of approximately 800 community volunteers in the cities of Eugene and Springfield in Oregon.
Goldberg, in his typically open spirit of collaborative science, provides the data from the Eugene-Springfield sample to interested researchers.
[12] With his colleague Sarah Hampson, Goldberg has initiated a 40-year follow up to a study started by John Digman at the University of Hawaii.
[8] Goldberg has previously served as the president of both the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology (1974-1975) and the Association for Research in Personality (2004-2006).