Qualitative and Statistical Impacts of Home Language on Responses to the Items of the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF) in South Africa

Abstract

The primary aims of the study were to compare the responses of different population groups to the items of the 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire, and also to explore some of the reasons for the observed differences. One quantitative and two qualitative studies were conducted in the process. For the quantitative study, 983 students of psychology or industrial psychology from four South African universities participated in the study. For the qualitative study, two samples were used, namely 71 second-year students and 10 honours-degree students from the Department of Industrial Psychology of the University of the Western Cape. To test for statistically different response patterns between the groups on each of the items, chi-squared tests were used. The findings showed that serious problems existed as far as the comparability of the items across groups was concerned, that participants whose home language was neither English nor Afrikaans experienced critical difficulties in understanding many of the words that would, as a rule, be regarded as rudimentary by English mother-tongue speakers, and also that the manner in which the items had been constructed impeded the comprehension of respondents who did not speak English as a first language. It would appear that the observed language difficulties may be associated with a number of socio-political and educational factors, but, based on the present results, it was not possible to uncover tenable explanations of some of the differences which are not so clearly bound to language issues. Nonetheless, the nature of the findings should be interpreted to sound a clear warning against the use of the test.