The most common way to measure personality traits around the world now is with Big Five inventories. Inventories based on this model, including dimensions of Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Openness, have been translated and imported throughout the world, even to hunter-gatherer groups in the Amazon.
The Five Factor Model, also known as the “Big Five” model of personality, is the most widely accepted and well-known theory within the dispositional perspective of personality. Big Five personality comprises five broad traits: extraversion (EXT), agreeableness (AGR), conscientiousness (CON), neuroticism (NEU) (or called emotional stability), and openness (OPN).
The model, however, was based on lexical studies of personality in the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands, three closely related languages and cultural contexts. The lexical methodology is uniquely well-suited to cross-cultural comparisons that might address the complex question of universality. However, subsequent studies in over a dozen other languages often only tested for the Big Five, perhaps to avoid contradicting influential members of the field who insisted on the universality of this model. Unsurprisingly, large recent survey studies indicate measurement validity problems for Big Five inventories in the majority world, outside industrialized Western countries.
A six-factor structure (called HEXACO or the Big Six) adding a scale with content related to honesty and integrity vs. taking advantage of others, demonstrated better convergence among a larger group of lexical studies, but later evidence suggests this model does not arise everywhere. The current study explores an alternative approach, creating an “indigenous” personality inventory based on the results of a local lexical study, and comparing it directly to an imported inventory of Big Five and Big Six traits.
The Khoekhoegowab Personality Inventory (KPI)
A recent lexical study of personality explored the most commonly used person-descriptive terms in Khoekhoegowab. Khoekhoegowab, literally “the Khoekhoe language,” also referred to as Nama, Damara, or Nama/Damara, is the most widely-spoken of ~15 extant Khoesan (also Khoisan) click languages of southern Africa.
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The exploration of personality description in Khoekhoegowab was initially motivated by basic science, rather than practical, questions. The goal was to build a local model of personality, in addition to those built in Maa and in Supyire-Senufo, in order to compile evidence from at least one each of the roughly three main language families in Sub-Saharan Africa, among cultural groups with different ethnographic characteristics in far-separated regions. This approach enabled researchers to represent some of Africa's great linguistic and cultural diversity.
In Khoekhoegowab, a systematic process of comparing potential models of the 272 most-commonly-used person-descriptive terms for robustness led to identification of an “optimal emic model” of 11 factors.
The 10-factor, 38-item Khoekhoegowab Personality Inventory (KPI) was created drawing on key terms for these dimensions, and its psychometric properties and convergent and divergent validity are assessed and contrasted with those of the 30-item Questionnaire Big Six translated into Khoekhoegowab.
Two to five were chosen for each of 10 factors of the optimal emic model identified in that project (described above). Item selection was from among terms with a loading of 0.30 or higher on the relevant factor; the number of possible items for each factor thus ranged from 7 to 21, with an average of 13.7. Choices within the pool for each factor emphasized the highest loadings on the dimension, and univocal terms (those with cross loadings never above 50% of the main loading), with consideration for the balance of forward and reverse-keyed items-scales were either unipolar (all items loading the same direction) or they included an equal number of forward and reverse-keyed items.
Here are the 10 KPI scales:
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- Temperance: Contrasts substance abuse and religiousness.
- Prosocial Diligence: Contrasts readiness to help and work with work avoidance and sloppiness.
- Gossip: Contrasts spreading rumors with being a good and wise person.
- Honesty/Morality: Contrasts deceitfulness with trustworthiness.
- Temper: Captures a tendency for reactive aggression and anger.
- Implacability: Contrasts being envious and difficult with being helpful and humble.
- Humility: Contrasts pride and arrogance with religiousness and compassion.
- Vanity: Includes terms for vanity, boastfulness, and pretentiousness.
- Resiliency vs. Agitation: Contrasts having a good and happy character with being restless and anxious.
- Courage vs. Fear.
Methods
Participants were 645 adult native speakers of Khoekhoegowab in Namibia. They were recruited from throughout the country, including central, eastern, northern and southern Namibia. Demographic information collected included age, gender, home language, participant and parents' level of schooling, household income, employment level, and location of survey-interview.
Aside from the Khoekhoegowab Personality Inventory, the other surveys used in this study were originally created in English. These surveys are the Questionnaire Big Six (QB6), the Duke University Religion Index (DUREL), the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS), the Cascades Mental Health Assessment (CMHA), and General Self-Reported Health (GSRH).
Results
Due to the small number of items on each scale, poor internal consistency was anticipated, but the KPI scales' properties were somewhat better than those of the QB6. R-square change by the inventories as a whole, after accounting for age and gender, indicted that the KPI scales explained more variance than the QB6 scales in almost all criterion variables.
The KPI had some advantages over the QB6 in predicting physical and mental health. In particular, the four items of Resiliency vs. Agitation predicted lower scores on all physical and mental problem scales. Given psychological-care needs in Namibia, this might be used as a non-intrusive screener.
Table: Comparison of KPI and QB6 in Predicting Health Outcomes
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| Inventory | Variance Explained in Health Outcomes |
|---|---|
| KPI | Higher |
| QB6 | Lower |
The 30-item cross-cultural QB6 is an inventory assessing six broad personality traits (Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Honesty/Propriety, Resiliency, Extraversion, Originality/Openness) with five items each. The items were chosen based on evidence of their cross-cultural applicability in a study comparing responses from 26 countries and languages.
The Big 5 OCEAN Traits Explained - Personality Quizzes
Prior research with Big Five/Six traits in other cultural contexts provided hypotheses to test for replication in the current study. In terms of gender, women have been seen to score higher on Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism. In terms of age, cross-sectional studies of Big Five traits show older people to score higher on Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Emotional Stability.
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