Macedonian Adaptation of an Enneagram Personality Questionnaire: A Psychometric and Factor Analytic Study

The Enneagram is a personality model describing nine personality types, each characterized by distinct patterns of thinking, feeling, and behavior. Despite its growing popularity in organizational setting and in personal development, empirical evidence supporting its psychometric properties remains limited, particularly across different cultural and linguistic contexts. The present study examined the factor structure and internal consistency of a Macedonian translation of a 93-item Enneagram questionnaire ,which was originally in Italian, administered to 200 Macedonian-speaking adults (63% female; age range 18–65, M = 38.9, SD = 13.7). Sampling adequacy was acceptable for factor analysis (KMO = .609; Bartlett's test, p < .001). Rather than supporting the theorized nine-factor structure, exploratory factor analysis yielded sixteen factors, with the first factor accounting for disproportionately more variance than the rest, suggesting the presence of a general response dimension rather than nine discrete types. Inter-factor correlations were weak to moderate (r = -.48 to .39), and did not show the pattern of stronger correlations between theoretically adjacent types (wings) predicted by the model. Internal consistency, assessed via Cronbach's alpha for each theoretical type, was inconsistent across types, ranging from poor to acceptable, indicating that the items that were in the same type were not really measuring the same thing. These findings align with prior studies examining the Enneagram's nine-factor structure and suggest that translation, cultural context, and the model's inherent conceptual overlap (e.g., wings) may all contribute to its limited replicability. The results highlight the need for further empirical testing, stricter translation procedures, and cultural adaptation before Enneagram-based instruments can be considered valid measurement tools especially outside of the original context.