| Abstrakt: |
Student teachers, working teachers, and retired teachers (N = 595) from four countries (France, Germany, Greece, and the United States) completed a questionnaire containing 186 items in Likert format with instructions to describe the mentally healthy person. Principal component analyses of item responses showed two cross-culturally invariant orthogonal factors, which were interpreted as High versus Low Mental Health and High versus Low Behavior Control. Factor loadings revealed a circumplex structure similar to that repeatedly found by Becker in studies of self-description of personality. Four scales were constructed representing the two main axes and the two diagonals of the circumplex structure. The scales were named Mental Health, Behavior Control, Social Adaptation versus Social Maladaptiveness, and Self-Actualization versus Inhibition. Analyses of variance showed cultural and age differences, which were interpreted as reflecting different degrees of permissiveness, varying self-concepts, and of differences in economic wealth of the countries studied. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER] |
