M.A. / The present study was conducted in order to construct a personality inventory that is cross-culturally valid for the South African population with at least a Grade 12 level of education. The Basic Traits Inventory was developed on the basis of the five-factor model of personality, which measures personality in terms of five broad domains, most commonly known as: Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness (McCrae & John, 1992). The five factors of Basic Traits Inventory bear the same name as those in the five-factor model, and are each divided into five facets, except Neuroticism, which has four facets. The factors and their facets were defined after a study of the literature, and the items of the inventory were generated in order to represent these definitions. After performing an item-sorting procedure, some items were revised or removed. The final format of the Basic Traits Inventory consisted of a single list of 173 items, which were all grouped according to their respective facets, and presented together for each factor. Three comparison groups were formed in order to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Basic Traits Inventory, namely: Race (Black and White), gender, and language (English, Afrikaans, and Indigenous African). The sample consisted of 1510 participants, made up mostly of second year psychology students and their parents, with a mean age of 37.52 (range = 17 to 75). There were 566 men and 914 women (30 unspecified) in the sample. The language groups were designated as follows: Afrikaans (n = 558); Indigenous African (n = 73); and English (n = 822). The race groups compared in the present study consisted of 1121 White participants and 114 Black participants. The internal consistency reliability coefficients were calculated for the factors and facets of the Basic Traits Inventory. The reliability coefficients of each of the five factors in the total group were all satisfactory: Extraversion (á = 0.89); Neuroticism (á = 0.94); Openness to Experience (á = 0.90); Agreeableness (á = 0.88); and Conscientiousness (á = 0.94). The five factors also demonstrated satisfactory reliability in each of the comparison groups. The facets Liveliness, Straightforwardness, and Modesty each had low reliability coefficients across all comparison groups. Openness to Values demonstrated low reliability in all groups except for the Black group and Indigenous African language group. Excitementseeking and Prosocial tendencies had low reliability coefficients in the Black group and Indigenous African language group. These facets will have to undergo revision in future versions of the Basic Traits Inventory. In a factor analysis, five factors were extracted using a maximum-likelihood factor analysis with Promax rotation (k = 4) for each of the comparison groups. The resultant factor structures were compared by rotating the structures of the comparison groups to a target structure, and calculating Tucker’s phi for each of the factors and facets in the structure. The White group, women, and English language group were designated as the respective target groups for the race, gender, and language groups. The factor structures of all comparison groups demonstrated satisfactory fit with the theoretical structure of the Basic Traits Inventory, with exception of the Black group and Indigenous African language group. Positive affectivity was the only facet that did not fit the theoretical structure of the Basic Traits Inventory for all comparison groups. In the Black group, the five factors that were extracted in the factor analysis were identifiable as the five factors expected from the theory. There was some overlap between Openness to Experience and Agreeableness, but most of the facets had primary salient loadings on their posited factors. The eight facets that did not perform as expected were: Positive affectivity, Anxiety, Order, Openness to Actions, Openness to Values, Modesty, and Prosocial tendencies. In the Indigenous African language group, there was a clear overlap between the Agreeableness and Openness to Experience factors. Agreeableness was the only factor that did not emerge clearly for the Indigenous African language group. Most of the Agreeableness facets loaded on the Openness to Experience factor, or on a fifth factor that could not be identified. This factor consisted of the following facets: Positive affectivity, Tendermindedness, Compliance, Openness to Values, and Depression. In the factor congruence analyses, for the race groups Agreeableness was the only factor that had a congruence coefficient less than 0.90. Six facets had congruence coefficients below 0.90, namely Positive affectivity, Openness to Actions, Openness to Values, Modesty, Tendermindedness, and Prosocial tendencies. For the gender group, all facets and factors had congruence coefficients of above 0.90, suggesting that the constructs measured by the Basic Traits Inventory manifest in the same way for men as they do for women. For the language groups, a comparison between factor structures of the English and Afrikaans language groups demonstrated good structural agreement, with Prosocial tendencies and Modesty the only facets with congruence coefficients less than 0.90. There was poor agreement between the factor structures of the Indigenous African and English groups, as well as between the Indigenous African and Afrikaans groups. In both comparisons, Conscientiousness was the only factor with all its facets having a congruence coefficient of above 0.90. The results indicated a relatively stable five-factor structure for the Basic Traits Inventory. However, due to the small size of the Black group (n = 114) and Indigenous African Language group (n = 73), it was recommended that more research be done with larger samples in order to verify the structure of the Basic Traits Inventory (Comrey & Lee, 1992). Suggestions for future research included replication of the analyses conducted with a larger, more representative sample, translation of the Basic Traits Inventory into Afrikaans and Indigenous African languages, the development of a shortened version of the Basic Traits Inventory, as well as studies investigating the convergent and divergent validity of the inventory. In conclusion, on the basis of the encouraging results, it seems that it would be worthwhile to continue the development of the Basic Traits Inventory.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uj/uj:14675 |
| Date | 12 November 2008 |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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