title: Studying personality and personality disorders among people in the Caribbean: advocating for an emic-etic approach.
abstract: This article discusses issues relevant to the examination of personality and personality disorder in contexts, such as the Caribbean, which are under-represented in this scholarship. The article argues that because normal personality is the standard against which definitions of non-normality (and at the extreme, disorder) are derived, a crucial first step in identifying personality disorder is clear and culturally relevant definitions of normal personality. Two key conceptual perspectives on personality development and manifestation are presented, followed by a brief exploration, using the etic traits approach, of the problematic nature of any one perspective on normal personality. The article argues for the need for combined emic-etic approaches to understanding normal and non-normal personality, particularly in under-represented contexts such as the Caribbean. It ends by offering concrete suggestions on developing, in the Caribbean, programmes of research committed to these tasks.
authors.affiliation: Department of Sociology, Psychology and Social Work, Faculty of Social Sciences, The University of the West Indies, Kingston 7, Jamaica. ishtargovia@gmail.com.
authors.forename: I
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Govia
authors.affiliation: Department of Sociology, Psychology and Social Work, Faculty of Social Sciences, The University of the West Indies, Kingston 7, Jamaica.
authors.forename: V
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Paisley-Clare
mesh_terms: D017691:Caribbean Region / Q000453:epidemiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010554:Personality Disorders / Q000453:epidemiology* / Q000208:ethnology*; D010555:Personality Inventory; D012107:Research Design