Fetvadjiev, V. H., Meiring, D., van de Vijver, F. J. R., Nel, J. A., and Hill, C. (2015). “The South African Personality Inventory (SAPI): A culture-informed instrument for the country’s main ethnocultural groups.” Psychological Assessment, 27(3), 827-837.
Reports the development of a personality inventory built from qualitative interviews in all 11 official South African languages, combining local (emic) and universal (etic) approaches. The final instrument has 146 items. Tested with Black, Coloured, Indian and White participants, it shows six factors (positive and negative social-relational dimensions alongside neuroticism, extraversion, conscientiousness and openness) with good structural equivalence across groups.
The model for building any governance-orientation instrument from local speech in several languages at once. Its prominent social-relational factors also suggest that relational orientation, the ground TIME covers, carries more weight in South African self-description than imported trait models allow. Cited in the TIME Profile brief and its Valley of Grace application.