Testing the measurement equivalence of personality adjective items across cultures

Although previous research has examined cross-cultural differences in personality, many of these studies neglected to first establish that the measures being used were equivalent in meaning across cultures. Using samples of Chinese, Greek, and American respondents, the measurement equivalence of the Big Five Mini-Markers [Saucier, G. (1994). Mini-markers: A brief version of Goldberg's unipolar Big-Five markers. Journal of Personality assessment, 63, 506-516] was assessed using confirmatory factor analysis. The results indicate that all of the scales demonstrate configural invariance, but fail to show metric or scalar invariance. Several adjectives from these scales were found to exhibit bias at the item-level. The practical implications of these results are discussed and future research is suggested. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.