The construction of an indigenous emotional stability scale

M.A.Psychological assessment is in a crisis in South Africa. Many local and imported inventories currently in use have not been tested for bias and have not been cross-culturally validated (Foxcroft, Roodt, & Abrahams, 2005). Others show various psychometric problems, such as low reliability and inappropriateness for previously disadvantaged groups (e.g. Meiring, Van de Vijver, Rothmann, & Barrick, 2005). The theoretical models on which these inventories are based were developed in the Western context ignoring South Africa’s multilingual and multicultural society. This may have resulted in inadequate selection of job applicants in organisational settings, and improper assessments of clients in the education and healthcare sectors. In order to make assessment suitable for the entire South African population, the development of indigenous theories, constructs and inventories that are valid for all cultural groups is therefore urgently needed. The present study aimed at the construction and validation of an indigenous Emotional Stability scale. Its development was based on the qualitatively derived Emotional Stability cluster of the SAPI1 (South African Personality Inventory), a project initiated in 2006 to develop a personality instrument, which is locally derived from indigenous conceptions of personality in all 11 official languages. The Emotional Stability cluster consists of six subclusters and 25 facets comprising person-descriptive terms, indicating positive and negative psychological adjustment. These person-descriptive terms were used to create a definition of the meaning of each facet for all languages ensuring coverage of the whole construct. Items were generated to represent these definitions. The final inventory consisted of a single list of 326 items, which was presented to a second year undergraduate psychology student sample, attending a course in personality psychology (N = 610). Participants also completed the Neuroticism scale of the Basic Traits Inventory (BTI, Taylor & De Bruin, 2006) and the items of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS, Watson, Clark & Tellegen, 1988) to allow for external validation of the indigenous Emotional Stability scale. Factor analyses indicated that the positive and negative facets of the Emotional Stability cluster defined separate factors, which led to the exclusion of the positive facets, resulting in the scale measuring only those personality characteristics typically attributed to Neuroticism. To denote the difference, the final scale was renamed “indigenous Neuroticism scale”. Three comparison groups were formed to evaluate the psychometric properties of the indigenous Neuroticism scale across language groups, namely: Germanic (English and Afrikaans), Nguni (Zulu, Xhosa, Swati and Ndebele), and Sotho (Sepedi, Sesotho and Setswana). The results of the present study revealed a valid and reliable, multifaceted indigenous measure of Neuroticism. The Neuroticism factor consists of five facets, namely Despaired, Anxious, Dependent, Temperamental, and Impulsive. Factor congruence of the indigenous Neuroticism factor across all language groups assessed was demonstrated, indicating that the dimension Neuroticism has the same psychological meaning across all groups. Tucker’s phi obtained for the factor Neuroticism for each language group was: Germanic (pxy = 1.00), Nguni (pxy = 1.00) and Sotho (pxy = .99)