African Cultures and the Five-Factor Model of Personality

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to assess if a specific personality structure and personality profile might be observed in Africa comparing data from four African regions (N = 1,774) with data from Burkina Faso (N = 717) and Switzerland (N = 1,787), according to the Five-Factor Model (FFM). A total of 4,278 participants completed the French version of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) made up of 240 items. Concerning the structure, a recombination of Extraversion and Agreeableness in two factors labeled Love and Dominance was observed before targeted factor analyses. After Procrustes rotation, the Swiss factorial structure replicated well in Africa. The only specificity was that the Excitement Seeking facet scale loaded consistently on the Openness factor in Africa. However, personality structures obtained in different African regions were not more similar among themselves than they were to the structure found in Switzerland. Finally, multigroup confirmatory factor analyses suggested that the NEO-PI-R dimensions reached configural and metric invariances, but not scalar invariance, at CHINESE UNIV HONG KONG LIB on February 9, 2015 jcc.sagepub.com Downloaded from Zecca et al. 685indicating that the mean personality profiles might be difficult to compare. Thus, this study showed no evidence for a unique pan-African structure.

The Personality Lexicon in Brazilian Portuguese: Studies with Natural Language

“…This approach is also exemplified by large-scale cross-cultural studies, which have WEIRD models, markers and instruments as a reference (e.g., Allik & McCrae, 2004;Bartram, De Fruyt, Bolle, McCrae, Terracciano, & Costa, 2009;De Raad et al, 2010;McCrae & Terracciano, 2005a, 2005bSchmitt et al, 2007;Zecca et al, 2012). These cross-cultural etic studies are based on tests of invariance or equivalence of measures that assess the multi-group comparability of constructs or scores (Byrne & Van de Vijver, 2014;Church et al, 2011).…”

The South African Personality Inventory (SAPI): A culture-informed instrument for the country’s main ethnocultural groups.

“…Although the replication of some factors (especially Openness) in some cultural regions (especially Africa) compared to Western targets is sometimes weak, this is typically attributed to issues of data quality rather than model applicability in the respective cultures (McCrae,Terracciano,& 78 Members of the Personality Profiles of Cultures Project, 2005). Using these instruments, no indications have been found that alternative models would be applicable to some cultures or world regions (McCrae et al, 2005;Schmitt et al, 2007;Zecca et al, 2013).…”

Do Self-Reports and Informant-Ratings Measure the Same Personality Constructs?

“…However, as has been noted in other instances such as when examining trait scores across age (Mõttus et al, 2015) or cultural groups (Zecca et al, 2012), mean score comparisons of FFM traits and/or their facets may be complicated due to lack of scalar MI. When this level of MI is not met, observed mean differences are at least partly not driven by the ostensible latent trait that the scale constituents ought to define, but by the constituents themselves.…”