week 6 Flashcards
personality
Aspects of an individual’s unique characteristics
Enduring behavioral and cognitive characteristics, traits, or predispositions
Trait
A characteristic or quality distinguishing a person
Identity
Perceived roles in life, life experiences and narratives, values, and motives
4 perspectives with measuring personality across culture
- Psychological anthropology
- Etic – focused on measurement equivalence of imported instruments
- Emic – indigenous, culture-specific approach
- Combined emic-etic approach.
4 perspectives with measuring personality across culture –> 1. Psychological anthropology
Mainly a descriptive approach. The early psychological anthropological studies were about describing groups of people, field observations and so forth.
4 perspectives with measuring personality across culture –> 2. Etic – focused on measurement equivalence of imported instruments.
The comparative approach that is focused on measurement equivalence of important instruments. That means that we’re looking at an instrument or a specific theory and the associated instrument and we’re interested in making the instrument work across different cultural settings. From an outsider’s perspective, focused on cross-cultural comparison.
personality=discrete, separate from culture; focused on measurement
equivalence of imported instruments
4 perspectives with measuring personality across culture –> 3. Emic – indigenous, culture-specific approach.
The emic approach in contrast is the culture specific approach. It is the approach that also goes together with a relativist cross-cultural perspective in which you cannot compare cultures that
easily. You should not engage in that because cultures need to be understood in and of themselves. You can only understand a culture from within the culture. It’s an insider approach.
4 perspectives with measuring personality across culture –> 4. Combined emic-etic approach.
How the comparative and the indigenous perspective go together.
Five-factor model / Big Five
OCEAN
- Openness to experience
- Conscientiousness
- Extraversion
- Agreeableness
- Neuroticism
Cultural differences in mean aggregate
levels exist – but these are small.
Why are there differences?
- Cultures shaped personalities
through learning - Selective migration of similar
individuals
personality profiles.
Two theories for the origin of personality:
- Five Factor Theory
- Evolutionary Approach
Emic: Ashanti Personality
o Child is given the name of the day, as it refers to the soul of the day (“kra”).
o Monday: quiet/peaceful
o Wednesday: Quick tempered/aggressive
o Correspondence appears too striking to dismiss.
o Is this a reflection of stereotypes, prejudice and bias? – self-fulfilling prophecy?
o Are these internalized expectations?
Emic: Ubuntu
o A person is only a person through others.
o Individual layers
o Three reference axes: family, community, ancestors
o ‘Seek the good of the community, and you seek your own good; seek your own good, and you seek your own destruction.
Emic: Amae
Form of passive love or dependency in adults
o Originating in the relationship with the mother
o Building block of Japanese relationships
o Familiar to self-distancing and self-assertive dimensions and could thus be translated into other personality dimensions.
SAPI and phases
The South African Personality Inventory
Phase I: Emic, culture-specific phase
Phase II: Instrument development phase
Phase III: Combined emic-etic cross-cultural phase
Employment Equity Act
Psychological testing should only be allowed when “the test (…) being used (a) has been scientifically shown to be valid and reliable, (b) can be applied fairly to all employees; and (c) is not biased against any employee or group.” (Employment Equity Act 55, 1998)
CPAI
Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory
SAPI Phase 1:
Phase I: Emic, culture-specific phase
Personality Descriptors
11 languages
Dictionary use problematic
Solution:
- Interviews with 1,216 participants
- 49,818 responses, 900 personality descriptors
- not exhaustive but ecologically valid
SAPI Phase II: Instrument development phase
Phase #2: Instrument Development
Consideration:
Will the item translate well?
Item too long in English? (would
increase in Bantu) Idiomatic items?
Item Culling
SAPI Phase III: Combined emic-etic cross-cultural phase
Combined emic-etic Phase #3 - Example
Relations between subclusters
were rated by NL students and
different language groups in SA.
- The aim is to establish validity.
- 204 students from different language groups in South Africa and 95 students from the NL.
- Hierarchal Cluster Analysis. If the structure of what goes together (clusters at the right level, at the same level) then we see that the personality structure is very similar and that would mean
that the validity of the tool would be established such that the structure that is relevant in South Africa can be also identified by students in the Netherlands.
API
The Arab Personality Inventory
