Culture and self in South Africa: Individualism-collectivism predictions

People from collectivist cultures may have more concrete and interdependent self-concepts than do people from individualist cultures (G. Hofstede, 198 0). African cultures are considered collectivist (H. C. Triandis, 1989), bu t research on self-concept and culture has neglected this continent. The au thors attempted a partial replication in an African context of cross-cultur al findings on the abstract-concrete and independent-interdependent dimensi ons of self-construal (referred to as the abstract-specific and the autonom ous-social dimensions, respectively, by E. Rhee, J. S. Uleman, PI. K. Lee, & R. J. Roman, 1995). University students in South Africa took the 20 State ments Test (M. Kuhn & T. S. McPartland, 1954; Rhee et al.); home languages were rough indicators of cultural identity. The authors used 3 coding schem es to analyze the content of 78 protocols from African-language speakers an d 77 protocols from English speakers. In accord with predictions from indiv idualism-collectivism theory, the African-language speakers produced more i nterdependent and concrete self-descriptions than did the English speakers. Additional findings concerned the orthogonality of the 2 dimensions and th e nature and assessment of the social self-concept.