Measures of Personality across Cultures

We first present an interpretative framework for describing cross-cultural applications of personality instruments. A distinction is made between publication identifiers (such as name of instrument and publication type), psychometric characteristics (such as internal consistency), and cross-cultural issues (such as translation checks and equivalence and bias tests). We review the most frequently employed personality inventories in terms of these characteristics. It is concluded that structural equivalence (referring to the similarity of the factorial structure of an instrument across all countries studied) is often supported. Furthermore, in the relatively few cases comparability issues are addressed, there is a focus on establishing invariance across cultures, thereby insufficiently paying attention to possible culture-specific aspects of personality, notably in a non-Western context