Personality and personality disorders in urban and rural Africa

Personality and personality disorders in urban and rural Africa

Different studies have observed that the structure underlying both the normal personality as well as the personality disorder is stable within all the cultures. The research conducted the nine African nations together with Swaziland ascertained the relationship between personality disorders and normal disorders was stable across the nations, therefore, suggesting that the dimension approach founded on the normal personality traits may be useful for describing the personality disorders in different cultural settings.  The research in Africa was usually carried out through the well-educated participants through the application of the European language version of different measurement instruments. Therefore, this implies that less privileged as well as preliterate samples, were not, in most cases, take into account or consideration. To study the relationship between the personality disorder and normal personality in a diverse sample the urban as well the rural region in Burkina Fuso the questionnaires and survey were documented in Moore language of the Mossi ethnic group, being one of the frequently spoken languages in the country (Rossier et al. 2013).

The primary purpose of the journal is to present how the five-factor theory of structural as well as expression of the personality traits describe or elaborates more on the relationship between personality traits and culture. The theory makes various assumptions regarding the effect of culture on the people’s personality structure and on how they also express their personality in a particular environment. Another purpose is presenting personality disorder and how they relate to normal personality traits. The hypothesis of the research article asserts that there is a relationship between personality traits and culture, and secondly, there is a correlation between personality disorder and culture. Therefore the review focus on the rare literature concerning the relationship between personality disorders- its underlying structure as well as expression and the culture will be discussed..

Materials and methods

There were 1750 participants from Burkina Faso, comprising of 834 women and 895 men. There were 21 participants who failed to indicate their gender. The participants fall under the age bracket of 17 to 95 years old. Thirteen thousand two hundred forty-nine participants came from the urban area of Ouagadouutya, while 501 participants were the residents of the rural area known as Ouahigouya. The questionnaire was used as a method of gathering data, and the five primary personality dimension focused on were “neuroticism (N), extraversion (E), openness to experience (O), agreeableness (A), and conscientiousness (C)” (Rossier et al. 2013). The response was indicated on the Likert scale ranging from strongly disagree to the strongly agree. DSM-IV PDs were also used for self-rating o with 77 items of true or false following ten personality disorders. The dependent variable, in this case, is personality, and the independent variables include the demographics factors such as age, language, gender, and culture. The correlation between urban and rural areas based on the perception and role of culture in defining the normal personality and abnormal personality were studied. Some of the research questions include; does the culture and personality traits correlated? And how does the personality disorder and culture related?

Result

The study asserts that there is a correlation between the age and the personality dimension for the participants from the urban sample. There was an insignificant correlation between age and personality disorder categorically in schizoid and schizotypal personality disorder from the subsample of participants from a rural area (Rossier et al. 2013).   The demographic variables had an insignificant or small effect on both normal and abnormal personality. The structure underlying the normal personality also was unstable within the entire regions as well as languages. This implied that translating the complex psychological inventory into the native African language was an extremely difficult task in spite of the help from the professionals. The structure founded on the abnormal personality was stable across the entire region. Regarding this result, another study should be carried out through the help of different methodologies to comprehend what is seen or considered as in different cultures as deviating from the expectation of an individual’s culture and as significant impairment in the self and interpersonal functioning based on DSM-5’s definition. Therefore the study supported the hypotheses is citing that there is a relationship between the personality traits and culture and secondly there is a correlation between personality disorder and culture

Discussion

The internal consistencies, correlation with the age as well as gender differences were globally low in relation to what is normally observed in the western cultures. For PDs, “these consistencies are low partly due to the heterogeneity of the symptomatology and comorbidity of these disorders and are similar to the consistencies found in other studies using the same screening questionnaire” (Rossier et al. 2013). The cultural values and the familiarity of people with the personality survey could have contributed to the manner in which the participants responds. The lack of finding in a rural area might have been influenced by the fact that they were living far from the urban center and, as such, not used to things like interviews compared to the urban sample. This must-have contributed to less heterogeneity in answering questions compared to the urban samples who answered in French.

Based on the weakness discussed above, future studies should use a different approach to increase the reliability of the result. The structured interview will be more appropriate for future studies or research. Regarding the scalar invariable difficulty while conducting the research in two cultures, different cultural settings taking more specifically into account the social context of personality disorder and broader social processes might result in an interesting outcome. An “anthropological approach or a combined emic and etic approach could allow studying the culturally shared representations about human nature’s personality, African personality model which includes ancestors” (Rossier et al. 2013)

Reference

Rossier, J., Ouedraogo, A., Dahourou, D., Verardi, S., & Meyer de Stadelhofen, F. (2013). Personality and personality disorders in urban and rural Africa: results from a field trial in Burkina Faso. Frontiers in psychology, 4, 79.