groups, whereas other personality instruments have shown much better equivalence. Equivalence cannot be
taken for granted and has to be verified empirically.
Second, no support is found for a relativistic, emic viewpoint according to which personality structure would
vary with cultural context in the cross-cultural equivalence studies. The evidence is most in line with what has
been called the universalist perspective in cross-cultural psychology ( Berry, Poortinga, Breugelmans, Chasiotis, &
Sam, 2011 , p. 290): ‘Basic psychological processes are likely to be common features of human life everywhere, but
(...) their manifestations are likely to be influenced by culture.’ According to this position, basic personality fea-
tures like extraversion are likely to be universal; yet, an item like ‘I am the entertainer at parties’ may only be
adequate in cultural contexts where parties are common and this behavior is appropriate.
Third, studies of cross-cultural equivalence have a bias toward establishing cross-cultural invariance of struc-
tures. The null hypothesis is almost always the etic perspective stating that there are no cross-cultural differences
in structure of personality. This practice would not limit our conclusions if our instruments represented various
theories and cultures. However, large-scale studies are invariably based on Western instruments and invariance
testing becomes a test of the equivalence of Western concepts and instruments. These cross-cultural studies have
provided us with valuable evidence about personality in various cultures. However, potential shortcomings of
Western models are not adequately addressed in such an invariance-testing approach based on Western models.
Psycholexical studies in China ( Cheung, Cheung, Wada, & Zhang, 2003 ), the Philippines ( Church & Katigbak,
2002 ), and South Africa ( Nel et al., 2012 ) suggest that social aspects of personality may need to be extended
(e.g., with interpersonal relatedness and softheartedness) for personality models to be comprehensive.
Fourth, few studies have addressed method bias (the main reason for omitting this form of bias from
Table 26.1 ). Social desirability has been most extensively addressed in the Eysenck personality assessment tradi-
tion where a Lie Scale is part of the inventory. Studies have shown consistent cross-cultural differences in Lie
Scale scores, with less affluent countries showing higher desirability scores. Recently, the view has been proposed
that response styles reflect culturally rooted communications styles ( Smith, 2004 ). It may well be that the uneasy
relation between personality assessment and response styles could profit from the combination of cross-cultural
studies and a substantive perspective on response styles in which styles act as culturally conditioned filters
between participants’ real and expressed views.
The fifth conclusion is more technical in nature and refers in particular to long instruments. Notably applica-
tions of structural equation modeling can face serious issues when applied to large-scale studies involving many
items. Fit statistics of confirmatory factor analysis models invariably suggest their poor fit, even when robust fit
statistics are used. In a cross-cultural study in which a scale of family values was administered to students from
27 countries, strong support for structural equivalence was found when exploratory factor analysis was used
(Van de Vijver, Mylonas, Pavlopoulos, & Georgas, 2006 ), whereas a tedious process was needed in which some
items and a country were excluded before any reasonable fit was found in a confirmatory factor analysis ( Byrne
& Van de Vijver, 2010 ). The underlying problem is essentially a power issue: Proponents of structural equation
modeling provide strong arguments that exploratory factor analysis does not have enough power to identify
equivalence issues. However, the proposed remedy, the use of confirmatory factor analysis, seems to show the
opposite problem; it could indeed be argued that confirmatory factor analysis has too much power to identify dif-
ferences. It is almost inevitable that in large-scale cross-cultural studies some factor loadings will differ more
across countries than would be expected if all countries were samples from the same parent population.
However, such differences may be psychologically inconsequential; the issue is similar to the distinction between
statistical and clinical significance ( Kazdin, 2003 ), where the latter refers to ‘the extent to which treatment makes
a difference, one of practical or applied value in everyday life’ (p. 691). Any small cross-cultural difference in
parameter values can become significant, given a sufficiently large sample size, but that does not mean that such
a small difference would lead to any difference in substantive interpretations of the cross-cultural similarities and
differences. We are still far from a situation in which we can distinguish between trivial differences and real
model misspecifications that should indeed lead to a poor fit and rejection of equivalence.
Finally, cross-cultural studies of personality seem to use essentially one type of translation check: translation-
back-translation ( Brislin, 1970; Van de Vijver & Leung, 1997 ). There is growing concern that such a procedure
could show problems ( Harkness, 2003 ). The procedure may be problematic if items contain cultural or linguistic
idiosyncrasies such as idiomatic expressions (e.g., ‘feeling blue’). Furthermore, the procedure puts a premium on
close translations even at the cost of poor comprehensibility of the items in the target language. It is probably not
surprising that in large-scale studies in which much public money is invested and accountability is important,
such as TIMMS and PISA, back-translations are infrequently used; for example, in the PISA studies double (for-
ward) translations are typically used, followed by a reconciliation stage in which differences between translations771 FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS
VI. SOCIOCULTURAL INTERACTION AND CONFLICT