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Robert R. McCrae and Juri Allik (Editors). The Five-Factor Model of Personality Across Cultures. New York: Kluwer, 2002, 333 pages, $45.00 softcover.
I always appreciate when a book's title is a clear and accurate indicator of what the book is about and, in this case, that's what we have. The book addresses several aspects of the cross-cultural application of the five-factor model of personality (FFM) and is divided into three major sections, each with a different purpose and a different style.
The first section, focusing on intercultural studies, includes several chapters that examine different aspects of the applicability of the FFM across a variety of cultures. Rolland's chapter, Cross-Cultural Generalizability of the Five-Factor Model of Personality, opens this section and provides an interesting and detailed empirical assessment of the degree to which the FFM is conceptually replicated across the range of cultures in which it has been tested. In general, this chapter suggests that the results are mixed-some dimensions (Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness) appear to be at least somewhat universally replicated, but others (Neuroticism, and especially Openness) appear to be more culturally contingent. This serves as a good starting point for other chapters, which then attempt to clarify the specifics of the cultural contingencies that the literature shows.
Among the particularly interesting chapters here is Konstabel et al.'s examination of the individualism-collectivism dimension of culture and whether this affects the position of the axes that comprise the personality circumplex. Also of note is McCrae's examination of the replicability of the FFM in 36 cultures. He presents an impressive array of data that is, in general, congruent with the results from the chapter by Rolland.
The bulk of the chapters in this section are similar to those mentioned above, in that they take a broadly cross-cultural perspective, relying on samples from several cultures to reach their conclusions. Kova et al. take a more tightly focused view of the NEO-FFI in Czech, Slovak, and Polish contexts, finding specific cultural differences in means even within this group of countries sharing highly similar languages. This chapter might have served well as a bridge between the large-scale intercultural chapters and the more narrowly focused intracultural chapters.
The second section takes a more culture-specific approach, presenting several chapters in which evidence...