Are Indigenous Chinese Personality Dimensions Culture-Specific?: An Investigation of the Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory in Chinese American and European American Samples
Abstract
The cross-cultural generalizability of Chinese personality dimensions—in particular, the Interpersonal Relatedness dimension of the Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory (CPAI)—was investigated in samples of Chinese Americans (n= 201) and European Americans (n= 236). Four CPAI factors, including Interpersonal Relatedness, replicated very well in a Chinese American sample and fairly well in a European American sample, indicating that these dimensions are not unique to Chinese populations. Lowacculturation Chinese Americans, but not high-acculturation Chinese Americans, averaged higher than European Americans on the Interpersonal Relatedness dimension. This suggested that the Interpersonal Relatedness dimension, although not culture-unique, is more salient in or characteristic of individuals who retain or identify with traditional Chinese culture. Contrary to previous interpretations of the Interpersonal Relatedness dimension in terms of interdependent self-construals, the dimension was only modestly correlated with relational and collective aspects of self, two aspects of interdependent self-construals.
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1. Because of an oversight, the demographic questionnaires for the first 34 European American participants and the first 77 Chinese American participants did not include a question about gender. Therefore, the estimated percentages of men and women reported for the sample are based on the percentages in that portion of the sample that did respond to a question about gender (i.e., 202 European Americans and 124 Chinese Americans). Gender was not a salient issue in the literature on this topic, and no hypotheses involving gender were being tested.
2. We thank F. M. Cheung for making available to us the English version of the Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory (CPAI) and the associated scoring keys.
3. We emphasized replication of the preferred four-factor solutions of Cheung et al. (1996; see also Cheung et al., 2003). However, because the pattern of eigenvalues suggested that solutions of fewer factors might be acceptable, we also examined two-and three-factor solutions in each sample. However, in comparing the Chinese American and European American three-factor solutions, congruencewas good for only two of the three factors (.91, .87, and .38). In the two-factor solutions, the congruence coefficients were fairly high (.97 and .89), but several scales did not load highly on either factor, indicating that more factors were needed.
4. Females, as compared to males, averaged higher on the Emotionality and Veraciousness scales and lower on the Optimism, Self-Orientation, Logical Orientation, and Defensiveness scales. The maximum effect size (eta2) was .05.
5. Some support for the view that personality may have influenced participants’ preferences regarding their degree of American orientation versus Asian orientation comes from some follow-up analyses we conducted. We found that second generation Chinese Americans, as compared to first generation Chinese Americans, averaged significantly higher on the bipolar acculturation scale and marginally higher (p< .08) on the separate Americanorientation scale but did not differ on the separate Asian-orientation scale. However, first and second generation Chinese Americans did not differ significantly on any of the Interpersonal Relatedness scales. This suggests that the higher Interpersonal Relatedness scores of low-acculturation Chinese Americans were the result of a choice to orient or identify with Chinese culture rather than lesser time in, or exposure to, American culture.
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