A Comparative Analysis of a New Dictionary of Personality Descriptors and the Shmelev's Thesaurus of Personality Traits

Abstract

We compared a new Russian dictionary of personality descriptors with the thesaurus of personality traits by Alexander Shmelev and his colleagues developed in the 1980s and 1990s. In the new dictionary, the descriptors were selected from the Open Corpus, a global Russian word collection which had included over 140,000 adjectives, nouns, verbs, and adverbs. We utilized a “German methodology” of the word selection which comprises a three-stage process; in so doing, we consecutively yielded a full (2,384 words) and abridged (1,253 words) dictionaries of the personality descriptors, with cognate synonyms and antonyms being removed from the latter. While developing the full dictionary, we engaged groups of experts who varied in their age, sex, and expertise, in amounts from 6 to 45 experts per group. In the full dictionary, full equivalents to contents of the Shmelev’s thesaurus were found for 624 words, whereas 1,353 words present in the Shmelev’s thesaurus were excluded (the reasons for it are discussed in the paper). From the Shmelev’s thesaurus, 109 words were absent in our initial 140,000 list, whereas 629 words in our dictionaries were absent in the Shmelev’s thesaurus. Overall, the Shmelev’s thesaurus was 26.2% equal to our full dictionary and 49.8% to the abridged dictionary. These differences do not imply different findings to be potentially revealed between the dictionaries, as the content of core personality characteristics can remain the same over the dictionaries. Consequently, estimations of the global Russian personality trait structure using either dictionary could closely fit. Conversely, the methodology of including or excluding descriptors in the particular dictionary could explain why the structures of personality were different.