Abstract
Orientation: A multicultural country like South Africa needs fair cross-cultural psychometric instruments.Research purpose: This article reports on the process of identifying items for, and provides a quantitative evaluation of, the South African Personality Inventory (SAPI) items.Motivation for the study: The study intended to develop an indigenous and psychometrically sound personality instrument that adheres to the requirements of South African legislation and excludes cultural bias.Research design, approach and method: The authors used a cross-sectional design. They measured the nine SAPI clusters identified in the qualitative stage of the SAPI project in 11 separate quantitative studies. Convenience sampling yielded 6735 participants. Statistical analysis focused on the construct validity and reliability of items. The authors eliminated items that showed poor performance, based on common psychometric criteria, and selected the best performing items to form part of the final version of the SAPI.Main findings: The authors developed 2573 items from the nine SAPI clusters. Of these, 2268 items were valid and reliable representations of the SAPI facets.Practical/managerial implications: The authors developed a large item pool. It measures personality in South Africa. Researchers can refine it for the SAPI. Furthermore, the project illustrates an approach that researchers can use in projects that aim to develop culturally-informed psychological measures.Contribution/value-add: Personality assessment is important for recruiting, selecting and developing employees. This study contributes to the current knowledge about the early processes researchers follow when they develop a personality instrument that measures personality fairly in different cultural groups, as the SAPI does.
Highlights
Problem statementIn South Africa, personality research and assessment has been gaining momentum in the last 10 years (Meiring, Van de Vijver, Rothmann, & Barrick, 2005; Taylor, 2000; Visser & Viviers, 2010)
Psychometric properties of the South African Personality Inventory items The results show that, of the 2573 items the authors developed, 36 items from the Conscientiousness, Integrity, Openness, Relationship Harmony and Soft-heartedness clusters yielded an absolute value for skewness of > 2 and for kurtosis of > 4
This study focused on developing an item pool to measure the various personality facets, sub clusters and clusters that the researchers identified in the first stage of the SAPI project (Nel et al, 2012) and on determining which of these items assesses the specific facets, sub clusters and clusters in a realistic and consistent way
Summary
Problem statementIn South Africa, personality research and assessment has been gaining momentum in the last 10 years (Meiring, Van de Vijver, Rothmann, & Barrick, 2005; Taylor, 2000; Visser & Viviers, 2010). The need for measures that are more sensitive to ethnic differences has heightened the interest in personality assessment (Nel et al, 2012; Valchev et al, 2011) This makes fair and comparable measurement more challenging. Differences in culture, the distribution of socioeconomic resources, education and employment statuses in the country further contributes to the challenge of fair psychological measurement in South Africa (Foxcroft & Roodt, 2009). This is relevant in instances where organisations use psychological measures for recruiting, selecting, placing and developing employees
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