Self-other agreement in personality traits and profiles across cultures: A multirater, multiscale study in Blacks and Whites in South Africa.

OBJECTIVE: Despite the importance of self-other agreement for the validity of trait models, few studies have assessed cultural differences systematically. We examined self-other agreement in traits and profiles in the more collectivistic Black group and the more individualistic White group in South Africa. METHOD: Participants were 172 Black and 198 White students, and one relative and one friend of each student. Participants completed a behavior-based and a trait-adjective-based inventory. RESULTS: Aggregated across traits and raters, there were no cultural differences in trait agreement. However, agreement was stronger for social-relational concepts in Blacks and for personal growth concepts in Whites, providing moderate support for the hypothesis of stronger agreement on culturally more salient traits. Trait agreement was stronger in Blacks' relatives and Whites' friends, but there was no such interaction in profile agreement. The differences in profile agreement (higher in Whites than in Blacks) involved normative agreement and were mediated by dialecticism (higher in Blacks) and social desirability (higher in Whites). Results with the two inventories were similar. CONCLUSIONS: In the framework of trait consistency research, cultural differences in self-other agreement may be limited compared to differences in perceived trait consistency, although sizable compared to differences in actual behavior consistency.

The World at 7:00: Comparing the Experience of Situations Across 20 Countries.

The purpose of this research is to quantitatively compare everyday situational experience around the world. Local collaborators recruited 5,447 members of college communities in 20 countries, who provided data via a Web site in 14 languages. Using the 89 items of the Riverside Situational Q-sort (RSQ), participants described the situation they experienced the previous evening at 7:00 p.m. Correlations among the average situational profiles of each country ranged from r = .73 to r = .95; the typical situation was described as largely pleasant. Most similar were the United States/Canada; least similar were South Korea/Denmark. Japan had the most homogenous situational experience; South Korea, the least. The 15 RSQ items varying the most across countries described relatively negative aspects of situational experience; the 15 least varying items were more positive. Further analyses correlated RSQ items with national scores on six value dimensions, the Big Five traits, economic output, and population. Individualism, Neuroticism, Openness, and Gross Domestic Product yielded more significant correlations than expected by chance. Psychological research traditionally has paid more attention to the assessment of persons than of situations, a discrepancy that extends to cross-cultural psychology. The present study demonstrates how cultures vary in situational experience in psychologically meaningful ways.

A confirmatory factor analysis of the General Health Questionnaire-28 in a Black South African sample.

This study examined the latent factor structure of the General Health Questionnaire-28 (GHQ-28) in a Black South African sample (N = 523). Results of the single-group confirmatory factor analysis support the universal four-factor structure of general psychological health observed in Western samples. However, multigroup confirmatory factor analyses (i.e. split-sample cross-validation approach, conducted with invariance analyses) for a three-factor structure suggest that psychological health could have a less differentiated dimensional structure in some African populations. Theoretical and practical implications of the study results are discussed.