Intra-and intercultural comparisons of the personality profiles of medical students in Argentina and the United States

Adolescence, Fall, 2002 by Horacio J. A. Rimoldi, Roberto Raimondo, James B. Erdmann, Mohammadreza Hojat

Examining the results corresponding to the Argentine sample, it was found that General Anxiety and Perception of Stressful Life Events loaded negatively for men but not for women, thus suggesting an association between Loneliness, General Anxiety, and Life Events for this group.

The loadings that define Factor 2 also show similarities in terms of Test Anxiety, General Anxiety, and Neuroticism, to which is added Self-Esteem for both men and women in the Argentine sample. An interesting finding is the negative loading in Locus of Control for men in the Argentine sample.

Because of the findings that Text Anxiety, General Anxiety, and Neuroticism had significant factor loadings for all samples, Factor 2 may be identified as an emotional instability factor. Examining the patterns and similarities across factor loadings for men and women in the Argentine and the U.S. samples, and within the limitations inherent to our data, it is possible to suggest that in terms of the latent factor structures, the personality measures used in the present study have a common underlying construct.

This supports the construct validity of the personality profile measures in the two cultures and in different sexes. The results of factor analyses generally suggest that the basic pattern of relations, or the characteristics of latent structures, when examined in terms of gender (intraculturally) and in terms of country (interculturally) are essentially the same, hence supporting the construct validity of the measuring instruments.

Reliability. We calculated the internal consistency aspect of reliability (coefficient alpha) for each measure used in this study. These reliability coefficients ranged from a high of .77 (for the Loneliness scale) to a low of .19 (for the Stressful Life Events scale), with a median of .63. We did not expect to obtain a high internal consistency coefficient for the Stressful Life Events scale because not all of the stressful life events had occurred for all of the subjects. Although the reliability coefficients are not very high, they are at an acceptable level considering the length of each scale (5 items). The lower alpha reliability, an index of internal consistency of the scale, is a function of uni- or multifactorial structure of the scales. In other studies we found that, as expected, the multifactorial scales (e.g., Stressful Life Events, Locus of Control) had lower internal consistency estimates than did unifactorial measures such as the Anxiety and Loneliness scales (Hojat et al., 1994, 1998). The pa ttern of these reliability coefficients is very similar to that obtained in another study with U.S. medical students (Hojat et al., 1994).

CONCLUSIONS

The results of this study generally suggest that while statistically significant differences in personality profiles exist between samples of medical students in Argentina and the U.S., the underlying constructs of the personality measures are not drastically different in the two countries. In other words, the construct validity of the personality measures used in the present study is relatively stable across the two different cultures.