Perseverance and conscientiousness

I thought I’d post a short blog today, looking at a single article that I found interesting. Zhang, Wetzel, Yoon & Roberts (2024) published “Perseverance, a Measure of Conscientiousness, is a Valid Predictor of Achievement and Truancy across the Globe” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.  Here’s the edited abstract:

Is Conscientiousness a useful construct across cultures? Using the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment data, we examined whether perseverance, a measure of Conscientiousness, was related to achievement and truancy across 62 countries/regions (N > 470,000). We investigated whether these relationships were linear or curvilinear in nature and assessed the utility of item-level information. After establishing partial metric invariance of the perseverance measure across various countries/regions and cultural regions, our findings unveiled that perseverance consistently predicted both math achievement and truancy, with predominantly linear associations. Notably, among the five items of the Perseverance scale, the item reflecting one’s tendency to give up easily in the face of challenges emerged as the strongest and most consistent predictor of math achievement. Further, country-level correlations between perseverance and both math achievement and truancy displayed contradictory patterns compared to individual-level correlations, suggesting the presence of biasing factors in how people respond to these measures. Nonetheless, it appears reasonable to conclude that measures of Conscientiousness are pan-cultural predictors of achievement and truancy. 

There are several things to love about this study – its huge sample size, with people from a wide range of cultures. I found it especially interesting that one’s tendency to give up predicts both math achievement. It makes sense to me that perseverance is a strong predictor of both math achievement and truancy.