Experience of cross-cultural validation of Machiavellianism skale as an instrument for the educational measurement

The Machiavellianism scale developed and used by Cloetta (1972) was taken as a basis for the measurement of Machiavellian attitudes of Lithuanian young people. In order to verify validity and reliability of the instruments, the traditional techniques are used in the investigation (verifying of internal consistency, test-retest reliability, content validity and construct validity). The author of the investigation uses original techniques to evaluate an impact of anonymity factor and the effect of social desirability. Verifying the effect of social desirability general hypothesis raised here was "The form of test presentation to respondents influences the psychometric dimensions of the test". It is stressed that measuring the Machiavellianism construct, there are reasons to believe that the enhanced social desirability response bias could be expected here. It is expected that it is possible to control and indirectly evaluate possible response set effect by mixing of items of different scales (of different constructs) and by using technique of depersonalization of item wordings. The sample of the research is made up of 260 respondents (young people aged between 17 and 20 years: pupils leaving secondary schools, first-second year students). The randomization of the sample to 3 groups of respondents has been made: 1)18 items of the Machiavellianism scale were responded to by the first group respondents; 2) 36 items of the Machiavellianism and Conservatism scales (by mixing and alternating items of both scales) were responded to by the second group respondents; 3) wordings of 18 items of the Machiavellianism scale were changed in order to create more abstract and depersonalized wordings of the items.The third group of respondents should evaluate Machiavellian attitudes of other people. Examples: "It is believed in our society that...", "Most people follow the principle that...". Data analysis was carried out on the base of classic and modern item response theories. In order to verify the hypothesis of the first stage of the research (to compare three different forms of the Machiavellianism Scale) a statistical procedure - Analysis of Variance (One-way ANOVA) - has been carried out. The result of the estimation of the impact of social desirability was: 1) the mixing of items of different scales (constructs) doesn't have any significant influence to response set effect measuring Machiavellian attitudes in Lithuanian youth populations; 2) the presentation of more abstract and depersonalized item wordings to respondents has some relation to response sets effect. The evaluation of construct validity of the Machiavellianism scale has been made here. In order to find out dimensionality of the Machiavellianism construct in new cultural context the factor analysis was carried out. The results of factor analysis confirm construct validity of the scale: the extracted factors could be interpreted in the context of the theory of Machiavellianism as a hypothetical model of Machiavellian personality. General conclusion of the research: the instruments for measuring of the Machiavellian attitudes (Cloetta, 1972) are cross-culturally valid and could be used to measure youth's attitudes in Lithuania