The effect of response style on self-reported Conscientiousness across 20 countries.

Rankings of countries on mean levels of self-reported Conscientiousness continue to puzzle researchers. Based on the hypothesis that cross-cultural differences in the tendency to prefer extreme response categories of ordinal rating scales over moderate categories can influence the comparability of self-reports, this study investigated possible effects of response style on the mean levels of self-reported Conscientiousness in 22 samples from 20 countries. Extreme and neutral responding were estimated based on respondents' ratings of 30 hypothetical people described in short vignettes. In the vignette ratings, clear cross-sample differences in extreme and neutral responding emerged. These responding style differences were correlated with mean self-reported Conscientiousness scores. Correcting self-reports for extreme and neutral responding changed sample rankings of Conscientiousness, as well as the predictive validities of these rankings for external criteria. The findings suggest that the puzzling country rankings of self-reported Conscientiousness may to some extent result from differences in response styles.

A cross-cultural study of the higher-order structures underlying personality disorders in French-speaking Africa and Switzerland.

Most studies about the higher-order dimensions to be considered in order to parsimoniously describe Personality Disorders (PDs) have identified between two and four factors but there is still no consensus about their exact number. In this context, the cultural stability of these structures might be a criterion to be considered. The aim of this study was to identify stable higher-order structures of PD traits in a French-speaking African and Swiss sample (N = 2,711). All subjects completed the IPDE screening questionnaire. Using Everett's criterion and conducting a series of principal component analyses, a cross-culturally stable two- and four-factor structure were identified, associated with a total congruence coefficient of .98 and .94, respectively, after Procrustes rotation. Moreover, these two structures were also highly replicable across the four African regions considered, North Africa, West Africa, Central Africa, and Mauritius, with a mean total congruence coefficient of .97 and .87, respectively. The four-factor structure presented the advantage of being similar to Livesely's four components and of describing the ten PDs more accurately.