The Roles of Personality Traits and Vocational Interests in Explaining What People Want Out of Life.

• Personality traits and vocational interests are important predictors of eight major life goals. • Vocational interests are stronger predictors of major life goals than the Big Five personality traits. • The patterns of results were consistent across two independent samples from two counties. Life goals reflect people's aspirations of what they want to become and what kind of life they want to live. In two student samples from the United States (N = 385) and Iceland (N = 1338), we used hierarchical regression and relative weights analyses to first replicate Roberts and Robins (2000) finding that Big Five personality traits predict major life goals, and then to test whether vocational interests have incremental validity in explaining major life goals over and above personality traits. Overall, vocational interests explained larger amounts of variance in major life goals than personality traits, and added incremental validity above and beyond personality traits. Expectations about specific linkages were largely confirmed across the two samples, providing implications for theory and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]