The establishment of implicit perspectives of personality among Sepedi-speaking people in South Africa

Abstract

The use of personality assessments for purposes of selection, placement, therapeutic intervention and counselling has generated a vast amount of interest, research and publications; especially measurement of "personality in the workplace" has been studied widely in the last decade. Since 1994 and the election of South Africa's first democratic government, the application, control and development of assessment measures have become contested. With a growing resistance to assessment measures and the ruling African Nationalist Congress' expressed purpose to focus on issues of equity in order to redress past imbalances, the use of tests in industry and education in particular has been placed under the spotlight. The Employment Equity Act has major implications for assessment practitioners in South Africa. The onus is on testers not only to be familiar with the broad domain of psychometric theory and research regarding the use of tests and test results, but also to be familiar with and contribute to specific empirical studies related to the psychometric properties of the tests they use. One of the objectives of this study was to discover implicit perspectives of personality within the Pedi culture. A qualitative research design was used with semi-structured interviews as data gathering . method. A Sepedi-speaking fieldworker was recruited to conduct 120 personal interviews with the participants from different sections of the Sepedi-speaking population in the Limpopo and Gauteng Provinces. A total of 5 000 Pedi personality descriptors were obtained from the 10-item interview questionnaire, and translated into English. Content analysis was used to analyse, interpret and reduce the descriptors to 136 personality characteristics which highlight the most important perspectives of personality for Sepedi-speaking individuals. These characteristics were grouped into nine clusters, namely Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Intelligence, Maliciousness, Manneredness, Openness, Sociability and Truthfulness. The findings of this study were compared to the Five Factor Model and evidence related to all five clusters plus four extra clusters were found. Limitations in this research were identified and recommendations for future research were made.