Assessing personality across 13 countries using the California Adult Q-set

Abstract

The current project measures personality across cultures, for the first time using a forced-choice (or idiographic) assessment instrument - the California Adult Q-set (CAQ). Correlations among the average personality profiles across 13 countries (total N = 2,370) ranged from r = .69 to r = .98. The most similar averaged personality profiles were between USA/Canada; the least similar were South Korea/Russia/Poland and China/Russia. The Czech Republic had the most homogeneous personality descriptions and South Korea had the least. In further analyses, country differences in CAQ-derived Big Five scores were compared to results obtained from previous research using nomothetic Likert scales (i.e., the NEO; the BFI). The Big Five templates produced generally similar findings to previous research comparing the Big Five across countries using Likert-type methods.

International optimism: Correlates and consequences of dispositional optimism across 61 countries

“…In line with this logic, we used the Matrix Comparison approach suggested by Gardiner et al (2019) that is especially suitable for comparing measures across a large number of countries. First, we correlated each item of the LOT‐R with every other item, producing a 6 × 6 matrix within each of the 61 countries.…”