Personality Test Proves Reliable in Azerbaijani Students, Major Study Finds

A widely used personality questionnaire has passed one of its toughest tests yet: translation into a language and culture where Western-style psychological measurement has rarely been validated. In a new study published in Discover Psychology, researchers report that the Azerbaijani version of the HEXACO-60, a 60-item inventory built around a six-factor model of personality, performs with impressive statistical reliability in a large sample of university students from across the South Caucasus nation. The findings, based on 1,178 participants drawn from seven higher education institutions, offer the first comprehensive psychometric evaluation of the instrument in Azerbaijani and add a rarely studied cultural context to the global map of personality research.

The HEXACO model, developed as an alternative to the better-known Big Five framework, organizes personality into six broad dimensions: Honesty–Humility, Emotionality, eXtraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience. The addition of Honesty–Humility as a sixth factor distinguishes HEXACO from five-factor models, capturing individual differences in sincerity, fairness, greed avoidance, and modesty that the Big Five were argued to underrepresent. The shortened HEXACO-60 scale assigns ten items to each dimension, making it a practical tool for researchers who need a fast but structurally complete assessment of personality. Whether such an instrument, largely developed and refined in Western and East Asian samples, retains its structure when answered in Azerbaijani has, until now, been an open question.

To answer it, a team led by Aynur Bunyatova of Azerbaijan University and the Azerbaijan Sports Academy, together with Mushviq Mustafayev of Baku State University and Leman Verdiyeva of Lankaran State University, recruited students from universities spanning the five major academic regions of Azerbaijan, including Baku, Lankaran, Ganja, Sumqayit, and the Quba branch of Azerbaijan State Pedagogical University. The sample included 654 males and 524 females, with a mean age of 20.9 years and a standard deviation of 2.1. This geographic breadth matters: many validation studies rely on a single urban campus, which can mask regional variation in language use and cultural norms. By drawing participants from institutions across the country, the researchers aimed to capture a more representative slice of the Azerbaijani student population.

The central statistical question was whether the six-factor structure hypothesized by the HEXACO model would hold up under confirmatory factor analysis, a technique that tests how well observed questionnaire responses fit a predefined theoretical structure. The results were encouraging. The model produced a chi-square value of 4,165.20 with 1,684 degrees of freedom, and, more importantly for interpretation, the comparative fit index reached .930 and the Tucker-Lewis index .923, both conventionally considered acceptable thresholds near the .95 benchmark for good fit. The root mean square error of approximation came in at .045 and the standardized root mean square residual at .048, both comfortably below the .08 ceiling typically treated as evidence of acceptable fit. In plain terms, the pattern of answers given by Azerbaijani students aligned closely with the six-dimensional architecture the questionnaire was designed to measure.

Reliability, the second pillar of psychometric soundness, also fared well. Every one of the six dimensions showed satisfactory internal consistency, meaning that items intended to measure the same trait produced coherent, correlated responses. Cronbach’s alpha, the classic index of internal consistency, ranged from .72 to .85 across the dimensions, while McDonald’s omega, a more modern measure that accounts for unequal item loadings, ranged from .74 to .87. Values in this range indicate that the Azerbaijani HEXACO-60 can be scored with confidence at the domain level, and that researchers using the instrument in Azerbaijani samples can trust that scale scores reflect stable trait differences rather than measurement noise.

Validity was assessed through the instrument’s relationships with two constructs that theory links to personality: self-compassion and self-esteem. Convergent validity, the degree to which a personality measure correlates with related constructs in theoretically expected directions, received clear support. Honesty–Humility and Emotionality showed the strongest positive associations with self-compassion, with correlation coefficients of .42 and .35 respectively. This pattern makes conceptual sense: people who score high on sincerity, fairness, and modesty, and those with greater emotional depth and attachment, may treat themselves with greater kindness and less harsh judgment. Extraversion, meanwhile, demonstrated the strongest positive association with self-esteem at .42, consistent with decades of research linking sociability, positive emotion, and assertiveness to favorable self-evaluation.

The significance of the study extends beyond the borders of Azerbaijan. Personality psychology has long grappled with the question of whether the major trait dimensions identified in Western samples are human universals or cultural artifacts. Cross-cultural validation studies are the field’s primary tool for addressing that question, yet entire regions, including the South Caucasus, remain strikingly underrepresented in the psychometric literature. By demonstrating that the six-factor HEXACO structure and its expected correlates replicate in an Azerbaijani sample, the study strengthens the case that the HEXACO model captures something fundamental about human personality variation rather than a peculiarity of the languages and cultures in which it was first developed.

The research also carries practical implications. Validated local-language instruments are prerequisites for everything from educational and clinical assessment to organizational psychology and public health research. Without evidence that a translated questionnaire measures the same constructs in the same way, findings from non-Western samples cannot be meaningfully compared with the international literature. The Azerbaijani HEXACO-60, now supported by evidence of acceptable fit, reliability, and convergent validity, gives researchers in Azerbaijan and the wider Turkic- and Persian-influenced linguistic sphere a credible tool, and gives international researchers a new point of comparison in a strategically located crossroads culture.

The study was conducted with careful ethical oversight. The Institutional Review Board of Azerbaijan University reviewed the protocol and, given the anonymous survey design, the absence of personal identifiers, and the minimal risk to participants, granted a waiver of full ethical review under Protocol No. 8 dated 13 March 2025. All procedures followed the Declaration of Helsinki, participation was voluntary with informed consent obtained from every participant, and no monetary or academic incentives were offered. The authors declared no competing interests, and the research received no specific external funding. The article is published open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.

As the first comprehensive psychometric evaluation of the Azerbaijani HEXACO-60, the study opens the door to a wave of personality research in a region where such work has been scarce. Future studies will likely extend the instrument beyond student samples to community and clinical populations, examine longer-term test-retest stability, and use the validated scale to explore how the six personality dimensions relate to wellbeing, academic outcomes, and social behavior in Azerbaijani society. For now, the message of the research is clear and consequential: one of personality psychology’s most influential measurement tools speaks Azerbaijani, and it speaks it accurately.

Subject of Research: Psychometric validation of the Azerbaijani HEXACO-60 personality inventory in a large university student sample

Article Title: Psychometric evaluation of the Azerbaijani HEXACO-60 in a large student sample

Article References: Bunyatova, A., Mustafayev, M., & Verdiyeva, L. (2026). Psychometric evaluation of the Azerbaijani HEXACO-60 in a large student sample. Discover Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-026-00869-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44202-026-00869-3

Keywords: HEXACO, personality assessment, psychometrics, cross-cultural validation, Azerbaijan, confirmatory factor analysis, self-esteem, self-compassion, Honesty-Humility, university students, psychological testing, South Caucasus