Academics from the Department of Human Resource Management, Profs Deon Meiring and Alewyn Nel, participated in a workshop held on 10 and 11 July 2017 at the Touch of Class Guesthouse in Pretoria. The workshop focused on the South African Personality Inventory (SAPI), a research project where scholars from various universities in South Africa (University of Pretoria, University of Johannesburg and North-West University) and abroad (Tilburg University, the Netherlands) collaborate.

The SAPI was initiated in 2005 and developed over a period of nine years from 2005 to 2014. It was constructed by adopting a combined emic-etic approach (indigenous convergent) approach that takes into account both universal and cultural-specific personality aspects as found in the eleven official languages of South Africa, namely Afrikaans, English, isiXhosa, isiZulu, Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, Siswati, isiNdebele, Tshivenda, and Xitsonga.

The goal of the research team when developing the SAPI, was to construct an inventory that is relevant to the South African multicultural context, and would meet the legislative requirements and scientific psychometric standards expected of established assessment instruments in order to provide the South African society with a reliable, valid and useful personality measure. Various articles concerning the project have been published since 2011.

The workshop was also attended by Prof Carin Hill (University of Johannesburg, SAPI collaborator), Ms Nadia Morton (University of Johannesburg, PhD student) and Prof Leon de Beer (North-West University, presenter of workshop). The reason for the workshop was to establish through exploratory structural equation modelling (ESEM) and bi-factorial ESEM the underlying structure of the SAPI constructs by reviewing the facets and items.

“Although we are confident in the established SAPI structure, ongoing research is needed in order to refine the structure and employ various alternative statistical methods,” the collaborators said. Ms Morton is currently a PhD student on this project and will utilise the results of the workshop in her thesis. Apart from Ms Morton's study, other students form part of the project. For instance, four students from the University of Pretoria and University of Johannesburg are currently assessing four translated versions (Afrikaans, Setswana, Sesotho and Tshivenda) of the SAPI. Additional translated version will be assessed in future.

Prof Leon de Beer (NWU), Prof Deon Meiring (UP), Prof Carin Hill (UJ), Ms Nadia Morton (UJ) and Prof Alewyn Nel (UP)