The Role of the HEXACO Traits in Kenya, Namibia, and South Africa

The HEXACO traits have been shown to be stable predictors of important life outcomes in Western, industrialized countries, but it remains an open question if they generalize to populations outside of Europe and North America. The current study explores the HEXACO traits and their associations with mental health, physical health, and religiosity among 18-year-olds from three African countries, Kenya, Namibia, and South Africa (N = 3000 in total). Because importing inventories with diverse phrases has been problematic in many regards, e.g., no such studies have established measurement invariance in African samples, the present study measured the HEXACO model using single-adjective marker items combined with a standardized item stem, “I tend to [be] …”. The marker items were identified as common denominators from six diverse lexical studies in the original work to develop the HEXACO model (Ashton et al., 2004; Saucier, 2009). Our research goal is to develop reliable scales for the HEXACO traits within and across the three countries. We will use the resulting scales to assess the associations of the HEXACO traits with religiosity, mental, and physical health found within and between Kenya, Namibia, and South Africa. These results will then be compared to previous evidence from Western samples to explore more universal versus more culturally specific aspects of personality trait associations.