Developing measures of cohesive, homogeneous entities is crucial to psychological assessment science. As researchers do so, they face the related challenge of how to organize such constructs into informative, descriptive theoretical systems, such as hierarchies. Hierarchies and other organizational structures can enhance understanding by providing description across varying levels of abstraction (Digman, 1997; Markon, Krueger, & Watson, 2005; Morgan, 1997). Of course, such systems depend, for their accuracy, on the validity of their elemental components.
