Cultural Index

Generalities

The Cultural Index, or CI, was created by Gary Walstrom and Cecilia Bruening-Walstrom in 2004, in partnership with Louis Janda, a professor of psychology at Old Dominion University.

The company is based in Leawood, Kansas. CI is most often found on the East Coast and Southern states of the USA.

Assessment

The CI questionnaire has two questions on two pages, each with 174 adjectives. The first question asks the respondents to describe themselves, and the second asks them to describe how they must behave to be successful in their current position. It takes up to 20 minutes to answer. Four primary dimensions are measured, shown with dots in the CI graphs, and designated with the letters A, B, C, and D. Three additional dimensions are measured; one, Logic, seems to be calculated on top of the four primary dimensions.

Dimension	GRI a priori
Autonomy (A)	Low 1, low 2, high 4 versus high 1, high 2, low 4
Social Ability (B)	Low 1, Low 2 versus high 1, High 2
Pace (C)	Low 3, low 4 versus high 3, high 4
Conformity (D)	Low 4, high 2 vs High 4, low 2
Logic (L)	N/A (composite factor)
Ingenuity (I)	High 1
Energy Units (EU)	Response Level

Usage

A job evaluation form called the C-Job Position Analysis Questionnaire allows users to evaluate the behaviors expected in a job and compare them with the person's profile. The publisher proposes the assessment as a management tool for all kinds of applications, including recruitment. The CI system deploys through training and services. The CI users learn the profiles for their use in management.

Comments

The CI primary dimensions are close to those of the AVA, DISC, Drake P3, PI systems, and others, which are based on four factors. The different content in the adjective list of the two pages prevents comparing the results from the two questions and analyzing a person's adaptation.

The second question of the survey targets the perception of the job, rather than the perceived demand of the environment and people at large. This distorts the analysis of adaptation, especially when it comes from past experiences and from people outside the workplace.

By design, CI doesn't measure a person's engagement, which results from a lack of stimuli in the environment. This also means it doesn't assess the energy it takes for adapting to their job, which is influenced by organizational and management efforts—or the lack thereof—and not solely by the individual.

The ingenuity assessment lacks precision and nuances that impair its utility. The measure is self-rated and closely linked to CI's A factor, as the statistics provided by the publisher suggest. Cognitive skills, such as ingenuity, might be better evaluated through tests, like those used for intelligence, skills, or abilities. Ingenuity can be expressed in various ways. The four primary factors could reveal this.

The four primary dimensions being measured are work-related, meet the considerations of parsimony and coverage, but as suggested by the above comparison with GRI’s four factors, may lack orthogonality, a consideration that emerged in the 1990s with the arrival of the Five Factor Model (FFM).