Testing across cultures

Chair

Ms. Nadine SCHUCHART (Hogrefe Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Germany)

Symposium Abstract

The drive to improve methodology for achieving cross-cultural equivalence when adapting psychometric tests has never been more important. In a world of increasing cultural diversity both across and within nations, the task of ensuring sensible interpretation and fair comparisons has grown in its complexity. Add to this the emergence of new testing formats and an evolving number of constructs of interest; the achievement of a solution to culture free testing seems to be ever more like a minefield. Indeed the first paper in this symposium questions the feasibility of achieving a solution at all and warns against achieving equivalence at the expense of the construct being measured. The second paper compares the functioning of a work based personality questionnaire across a number of European cultures giving special attention to item functioning rather than restricting the study to scores at the overall scale level. The third paper considers the special issues in adapting the same work based questionnaire to China; a culture very different from those across Europe. Our final paper presents findings from the crosscultural adaptation of a Leadership Judgement questionnaire comparing the generalisability of leadership style preferences, leadership judgement and item difficulty level across a range of European countries.