The Big Five and adolescent adjustment: An empirical test across six cultures

The current cross-cultural study tested the measurement of the Big Five personality dimensions and the relationships between them and four measures of adjustment and well-being, namely measures of depression, anxiety, well-being, and self-esteem. Anonymous data were collected on 5835 middle and late adolescents from six different cultural contexts, namely China, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Taiwan, and Turkey. Based on an ESEM approach, which fit the data better than a CFA, configural invariance was found for a 28-item short form of the BFI, suggesting that the Big Five model fit adequately across cultures. Findings from path analyses provided evidence that the Big Five factors explained from an average of 21% of the variance in anxiety to 26% in low well-being, net any effects by background variables. Consistent with some previous work, the study provides new evidence on the links between the Big Five and four measures of adolescent adjustment and well-being across six distinct cultural contexts. It also illustrates some of the inherent challenges of modeling the structure and psychometric properties of the Big Five in a cross-national comparative framework.