Locus-of-Control Attribution

Abstract

Although considerable evidence has accumulated from studies in North America that locus of control is multifactorial, little cross-cultural confirmation has emerged, particularly from Africa. Anthropological data suggest that African subjects should be influenced by supernatural beliefs in making attributions about reasons for events, but in a complex way involving powerful others in their social environment. A questionnaire with systematically balanced combinations of event type and explanations for the events was presented to male and female black and white students in Zambia and Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. The scale performed well psychometrically and partly confirmed the hypotheses, though the factorial structures were remarkably similar across cultures. Two orthogonal factors provided the optional simple structure for both blacks and whites; they comprised items referring to (I) personal effort and attributes, and (II) chance and the supernatural. The roles of interpersonal and societal influences were unclear, and there was ambiguous support for the hypothesis of greater importance of supernatural attributions for blacks.