engleski

Assessing the relation between intercultural sensitives and personality traits in high school teachers in the city of Vukovar, Croatia

The goal of this empirical research was to examine the interdependence between intercultural sensitives and personality traits. This research was conducted with teachers (N=172) from all secondary schools in the city of Vukovar, Croatia. Taking into account previous researches and the fact that, in the post-war community, the ethnic division is evident in all aspects of social life including the education. The pupils in Vukovar attend separate classes divided according to ethnicity, and the curriculum is provided in Croatian or Serbian language (Corkalo, Ajdukovic, 2007). The division of classes, 90s war, as well as ongoing ethnic intolerance create a challenging situation with regard to intercultural sensitivity in teachers. For that reason, it was important to examine teachers’ intercultural sensitivity, as well as its association with personality traits. Intercultural competent teacher is the one who is successful in communicative transformation from monoculture to multicultural person. In order to achieve that, authors suggested that teachers need to develop new set of skills with already developed awareness towards culturally different groups taking into account personality traits of teachers. As a measure of intercultural sensitivity, The Intercultural Sensitivity Scale (ISS by Chen and Starosta, 2000) was used, and Big Five Inventory (BFI by Benet-Martinez and John, 1998) was used to assess personality traits. The results have confirmed significant associations between intercultural sensitivity and personality, namely a negative correlation with neuroticism and positive correlations with conscientiousness and agreeableness. It seems that teacher who are more emotionally stable (low neuroticism), who are responsible and efficient in their responsibilities, as well as friendly and compassionate toward others, tend to be more intercultural sensitive. Therefore, our results suggest that, while intercultural sensitivity does depend on environmental factors, personality factors should be considered in both examining and promoting intercultural sensitivity.

Personality ; intercultural sensitivity ; high school ; teachers

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