Development and Validation of an International English Big-Five Mini-Markers☆
Introduction
Personality dimensions have long attracted research attention (Eysenck, 1991). The five-factor model of personality (Goldberg, 1990, McCrae and Costa, 1987) has met with particularly wide application in the personality field, plus across disciplines as diverse as aviation (Grant et al., 2007), politics (Schoen & Schumann, 2007), and entrepreneurship (Zhao & Seibert 2006). The model’s wide disciplinary application has prompted the development of several brief big-five measures comprising fewer than 50 single-item adjectives or only a very few statement-based items specifically for use in applied research settings where respondent time or instrument space are constrained (e.g. Gosling et al., 2003, Langford, 2003, Saucier, 1994, Woods and Hampson, 2005).
While, as Church (2001) notes, some debate has existed about the uniform replicability of the five-factor model in emically developed measures across some cultures such as China (Cheung et al., 2001), the model’s general cross-cultural applicability has, nevertheless, stimulated translations of relatively long big-five measures into Chinese (Trull & Geary, 1997), Croatian (Mlacic & Goldberg, 2007), Italian (Terracciano, 2003), Spanish (Garcia, Aluja, & Garcia, 2004), and other languages. Such translations tend to support the broad cross-cultural applicability of the five-factor model. For example, Hendriks, Hofstee, and De Raad (1999) developed interactively in Dutch, English and German a 100-statement big-five measure that confirmed the five-factor structure in these languages and 11 others into which it was subsequently translated, including Chinese and Japanese. More recently, Schmitt, Allik, McCrae, and Benet-Martínez (2007) found robust support for the five-factor model across world regions in a study covering 56 nations using a 44-statement (173-word) big-five measure. Some brief big-five measures have also been translated, although as yet only into German (Muck et al., 2007, Rammstedt and John, 2007) and Swedish (Hochwalder, 2006).
The relatively low number of languages into which any single brief big-five measure has so far been translated has meant that some forms of applied cross-cultural research demanding brief measures have been constrained. Most particularly, applied research in cross-cultural settings where multiple national backgrounds can (a) be anticipated, are (b) of specific interest, but (c) cannot necessarily be known precisely in advance is currently impossible, except, as Thompson (2007) suggests, using English measures. Such research settings include international government bodies and firms, plus, of course, many educational institutions, where populations increasingly comprise individuals from numerous countries who, despite not always being native English-speakers, are obliged to operate organizationally in English.
Because English big-five measures have been emically developed, predominantly among native English-speakers in North America, research is needed to assess their psychometric properties among non-native English-speakers before they can with confidence be used in international research settings. No such research has yet been undertaken. The six studies reported in this paper, first, examine the psychometric performance of Saucier’s (1994) big-five Mini-Markers, in an English-using, multinational sample, then, having found its psychometric properties to be suboptimal, develop and validate an International English Mini-Markers.
The Mini-Markers, a short-form of Goldberg’s (1992) unipolar lexical big-five measure, is selected for assessment because it has proven to be one of the most psychometrically reliable (Mooradian & Nezlek, 1996) and frequently used brief big-five measures, being employed widely in personality research (Diefendorff and Richard, 2003, McCullough et al., 2002) and in applied settings across several disciplines, including health (Austin, Saklofske, & Egan, 2005), business (Erdheim, Wang, & Zickar 2006), and education (Moon & Illingworth, 2005). Comprising just 40 single-adjective personality descriptors originally selected for their psychometric qualities (Saucier, 1994), the Mini-Markers can be hypothesized to lend itself without translation to use with multinational samples that use English.
Section snippets
Participants
Participants comprised 491 family and friends of executive MBA students at an English-based international university in East Asia who had volunteered to assist with research, plus had identified themselves as proficient at English. The sample therefore represents the relatively affluent and educated strata of individuals who might reasonably be encountered in numerous international but English-speaking research settings (see Table 1 for demographic details).
Measure
The Mini-Markers was used as Saucier
Participants
Two focus groups were conducted to investigate Mini-Marker items’ clarity, ease of understanding and singularity of meaning. Together, focus groups comprised 13 executive-MBA students and 5 undergraduates, average age 26, half being male, at the same East Asian international university, who came variously from America, Burma, China, Hungary, Indonesia, Mexico, Mongolia, the Philippines, Thailand, Tonga, and Vietnam.
Results
Certain items were not uniformly familiar to non-native English-speakers, either
Participants
Participants, 650 family and friend volunteers of a different set of MBA students at the same East Asian international university (see Table 1 for demographics), completed instruments online.
Measure
To help determine which Mini-Marker items to replace, data from the initial Mini-Marker assessment study were used to determine each sub-scale’s items contribution to internal consistency with a view to eliminating those that (a) contributed least, (b) loaded poorly in the whole scale principal component
Participants
Participants comprised 459 family and friend volunteers of master degree students studying international relations at the same East Asian international university (Table 1) who completed instruments online.
Measure
The three selection criteria used for the first scale revision suggested that all Extraversion sub-scale items and their order be retained. For Agreeableness, the criteria suggested replacement of cold and unsympathetic. Again using Goldberg (1992) and Saucier (1997) as replacement sources,
Participants
Participants, 1,927 family and friend volunteers of two undergraduate management classes’ students and a further set of MBA students at the same East Asian international university (see Table 1 for demographics). Instruments were completed online.
Measure
Using the three item-evaluation criteria mentioned above, the Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Agreeableness sub-scales were retained unaltered, but unintelligent in the Intellect or Openness sub-scale was altered to intelligent, and in the
Temporal stability
Three months after the initial test with the final scale revision, a retest was completed by a randomly selected sub-sample of 85 of the initial test participants. Correlations between test and retest data were .83 for Extraversion, .70 for Intellect or Openness, .73 for Emotional Stability, .81 for Conscientiousness, and .79 for Agreeableness, indicating ‘exemplary’ medium-run temporal stability by the criteria suggested by Robinson, Shaver, and Wrightsman (1991, p. 13). As Saucier (1994) does
Limitations
While the International English Mini-Markers exhibits across both native and non-native English-speakers stable and interpretable factor structure, good orthogonality, adequate sub-scale internal consistency reliabilities, convergent validity and temporal stability, limitations need to be acknowledged. First, the aggregation of respondents into native and non-native English speakers is broad and potentially masks country-level differences in the psychometric performance of the International
Acknowledgements
Two anonymous reviewers and Colin Cooper are thanked for their useful comments and suggestions.
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Support for this research was provided by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Grant No. 16330082.