| Summary: | The application of personality assessment for clinical and personnel decisions has long been
an activity of interest to psychologists all over the world. In South Africa, personality
assessment tools are used for the purpose of hiring, for placement decisions, to guide and
assess training and development, and to evaluate the performance of workers. Psychological
testing in South Africa was formerly initiated with white test takers in mind. It has been
found that, currently, none of the available personality questionnaires provide a reliable and
valid picture of personality for all cultural (language) groups living in South Africa.
With South Africa's new Constitution in 1994 came stronger demands for the cultural
appropriateness of psychological tests. The implicit perspectives of personality of Zulu-speaking South Africans were determined in this study. These will enable psychologists to
work towards developing a personality assessment tool that is fair to all South African
cultural (language) groupings.
A qualitative research design was used with an interview as data-gathering instrument. A
Zulu-speaking fieldworker was recruited to interview 141 Zulu-speaking South Africans,
mainly from KwaZulu-Natal. The study population was purposely drawn from different
sections of the Zulu-speaking population. A total of 6 465 Zulu-speaker personality
descriptors was obtained from the respondents and then translated into English. Content
analysis was used to analyse, interpret, and reduce these descriptors to a total of 179 (reduced
to 128 personality characteristics), which highlight the most important perspectives of
personality for Zulu-speaking individuals. The personality characteristics were divided into six categories, namely, drive, emotions,
interpersonal factor, meanness, sociability, and other. The majority of the characteristics are representative of the socialistic nature of the Zulu people. Zulu-speaking persons are caring,
loving, religious, helping, talkative, in touch with their sexuality, and extroverted.
The findings of this study were compared to the Five Factor Model (FFM), and evidence was
found for the extroversion factors, but no support or evidence was found for the openness to
experience factor, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and agreeableness. In comparison with the
Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory (CPAI), support was found for 13 of the 22
personality scales. Characteristics such as emotionality, responsibility, inferiority versus self-acceptance, meanness, slickness, family orientation, relationship orientation, harmony,
flexibility, modernisation, introversion versus extroversion, leadership, and social orientation
can be seen as characteristics indigenous to the Zulu culture.
Recommendations were made for future research. === Thesis (M.A. (Industrial Psychology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2009.
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