On Enhancing the Cross-Cultural Comparability of Likert-Scale Personality and Value Measures: A Comparison of Common Procedures

This study aims to evaluate a number of procedures that have been proposed to enhance cross-cultural comparability of personality and value data. A priori procedures (anchoring vignettes and direct measures of response style), a posteriori procedures focusing on data transformations prior to analysis (ipsatization and item parceling), and two data modeling procedures (treating data as continuous vs. as ordered categories) were compared using data collected from university students in 16 countries. We found that (1) anchoring vignettes showed lack of invariance, so they were not bias-free; (2) ipsatization lowered scale reliability, whereas other procedures did not jeopardize scale reliability; (3) in measurement invariance testing, no procedure yielded scalar invariance; anchoring vignettes and item parceling slightly improved comparability, response style correction did not affect it, and ipsatization resulted in lower comparability; (4) treating Likert-scale data as categorical resulted in higher levels of comparability; and (5) factor scores of scales extracted from different procedures showed similar correlational patterning with the exception of ipsatization. We conclude that, although no procedure resolves all comparability issues, anchoring vignettes, parceling, and treating data as ordered categories seem promising to alleviate incomparability. We advise caution in uncritically applying any of these procedures