Personality and Personality Disorders in Urban and Rural Africa: Results from a Field Trial in Burkina Faso

Abstract

When conducting research in different cultural settings, assessing measurement equivalence is of prime importance to determine if constructs and scores can be compared across groups. Structural equivalence implies that constructs have the same meaning across groups, metric equivalence implies that the metric of the scales remains stable across groups, and full scale or scalar equivalence implies that the origin of the scales is the same across groups. Several studies have observed that the structure underlying both normal personality and personality disorders (PDs) is stable across cultures. Most of this cross-cultural research was conducted in Western and Asian cultures. In Africa, the few studies were conducted with well-educated participants using French or English instruments. No research was conducted in Africa with less privileged or preliterate samples. The aim of this research was to study the structure and expression of normal and abnormal personality in an urban and a rural sample in Burkina Faso. The sample included 1,750 participants, with a sub-sample from the urban area of Ouagadougou (n = 1,249) and another sub-sample from a rural village, Soumiaga (n = 501). Most participants answered an interview consisting of a Mooré language adaptation of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory and of the International Personality Disorders Examination. Mooré is the language of the Mossi ethnic group, and the most frequently spoken local language in Burkina Faso. A sub-sample completed the same self-report instruments in French. Demographic variables only had a small impact on normal and abnormal personality traits mean levels. The structure underlying normal personality was unstable across regions and languages, illustrating that translating a complex psychological inventory into a native African language is a very difficult task. The structure underlying abnormal personality and the metric of PDs scales were stable across regions. As scalar equivalence was not reached, mean differences cannot be interpreted. Nevertheless, these differences could be due to an exaggerated expression of abnormal traits valued in the two cultural settings. Our results suggest that studies using a different methodology should be conducted to understand what is considered, in different cultures, as deviating from the expectations of the individual’s culture, and as a significant impairment in self and interpersonal functioning, as defined by the DSM-5.

Broadening horizons: Sample diversity and socioecological theory are essential to the future of psychological science

“…One obstacle to cross-cultural personality research is judging whether differences are genuine or instead artifacts due to methodological inconsistencies (69). For example, failures of samples in low-income countries to replicate the Big Five structure have been blamed on inconsistent response styles of participants.…”

“…Other findings with indigenous populations are instructive. For example, failure to demonstrate the Big Five has also been recently shown among both rural and urban Mossi in Burkina Faso (69). Among 12 isolated languages, including Maasai, Fijian, and Enga, a lexical approach documenting universal attribute concepts highlighted just two dimensions of dynamism and social self-regulation (70).…”

Agreeableness, antagonism, and mental health across cultures

“…The Personality Disorder Questionnaire and Interview had acceptable psychometric properties in Chinese (Yang et al, 2000), and the International Personality Disorder Examination had acceptable interrater reliability and temporal stability in samples of clinical patients from cities across North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia (Loranger et al, 1994), a study that found Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) especially prevalent. The inventory structure was also stable in a sample of French-speaking African countries, and when translated into Moor e, and administered by interview to villagers in Burkina Faso (Rossier, Ouedraogo, Dahourou, Verardi, & Meyer de Stadelhofen, 2013). Though thresholds for impairment may vary, there are surely individuals who "deviate markedly from the expectations of their culture" in every society (Tseng, 2001).…”

Personality Disorders in Older Adults: a Review of Epidemiology, Assessment, and Treatment

“…Furthermore, these studies should encompass this "proneness" at least to a certain extent as well, as they all sampled older adults. It seems more likely that the use of the Personality Disorders Questionnaire (PDQ-4), which has a high false positive rate [10] and cultural aspects might account for this difference, as studies show that individuals living in more traditional societies, as is Central Africa, score higher on dependent traits than those in more westernized cultures [11]. Moreover, the cognitive status might bias the judgements about PDs; interviewees might have attributed some items (incorrectly) to enduring personality patterns instead of to the person's current (cognitive) state.…”