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This 2018 – 2021 project (Swiss National Science Foundation Project grant 10001C_179458), led by Amber Gayle Thalmayer (University of Lausanne) in close collaboration with Elizabeth Shino (University of Namibia) and Sylvanus Job (Humboldt University zu Berlin, University of Namibia) and many other team members and collaborators, laid important groundwork for the Africa Long Life Study. Importantly, the studies were conducted with extensive community participation, samples of adults rather than university students, and included qualitative interviews to better explore the meaning and context of terms and concepts in the larger surveys.
Lexical studies, based on the rationale that the most important distinctions between people will be encoded in the language, led to the advent of the popular Big Five model of personality structure. While this methodology allows for the integration of results from diverse languages, the dominant Big Five model is based almost exclusively on data from North American and Europe.
The PersoNa project supported the first lexical studies from African languages, representing the three main sub-Saharan language families. A large quantitative lexical study of personality in the Khoekhoe language built a bottom-up model of personality description. Uniquely, this was enriched with in-depth qualitative interviews, to understand the context and values in person description, and to disambiguate key terms. The project also supported completion of lexical studies in Maasai (East Africa) and Senufo (West Africa), in societies with differing ecological, socio-economic characteristics. Additionally, a Khoekhoe personality inventory was created, and shown to better predict important life outcomes than an imported Big Six inventory.
These studies provided strong tests of universality, and evidence for the cultural-specificity of the Big Five to the West. A clearer definition of the role of culture in personality traits and structure became possible. I summarized this in a critical and constructive review to celebrate the 50 year anniversary of the International Association for Cross Cultural Psychology. This evidence was also central to creating the culturally decentered (culture fair) Cross Cultural Big Two Inventory. This draws on the common denominator content across global, bottom-up lexical studies.
A similar quantitative and qualitative balance, integrating extensive community involvement, was brought to subsequent studies on mental health. In addition to the team members above, Mr. Paulus Mwetulundila (University of Namibia) and Ms. Mathilda Maletsky (General Accounting Office of Namibia) supported planning, interviewer recruitment, data collection. A total of 682 Khoekhoe-, 719 Oshiwambo-, and 636 English-speakers were recruited and completed the survey as a one-on-one interviews with trained research assistants working through the country. The survey included adapted and translated versions of the International Mental Health Assessment (IMHA) , the Satisfaction with Life Scale, the Duke Religion Index, General Self-Reported Health, and personality traits (the Khoekhoegowab Personality Inventory, Questionnaire Big Six).
Following the survey, three key topics were identified for in-depth exploration to put survey results into a nuanced context: Depression, trauma sequalae, and alcohol abuse. Because terms for the western syndromes were not directly translatable into Khoekhoe, Dr Sylvanus Job identified Idioms related to these experiences in Khoekhoe, and an interview was developed to explore them without assuming or requiring them to be direct one-to-one translations. An interview to explore perceptions of these conditions was developed together with Dr. Elizbeth Shino (University of Namibia) and Dr. Milena Claudius (University of Lausanne). Twenty-six interviews were conducted with speakers of Khoekhoe in six sites throughout Namibia. A first report explores discourses around trauma, where it comes from, the dangers it poses, and means of recovery, for example through community interconnectedness and prayer.
The PersoNa study finally supported Ms. Selma Uugwanga in conducting 50 interviews with young adult Oshiwambo speakers on alcohol use motivation and the experience of becoming an adult among speakers.
