The structured assessment of personality across cultures

The purpose of this article is to review several popular, structured, personality questionnaires in terms of their applicability in cross-cultural assessment contexts. Prior to our review, we describe the types of psychometric data that can be used to support claims of a measure's cross-cultural applicability. More important, we list several factors, not all of which have to do with the measure itself, that can undermine such cross-cultural evidence. We then review relevant cross-cultural data on the California Psychological Inventory, the Comrey Personality Scales, the 16 Personality Factors Questionnaire, the Pavlovian Temperament Survey, the Personality Research Form, and the Nonverbal Personality Questionnaire. We show that those inventories have each demonstrated mostly replicable factor structures across cultures. In contrast, relatively little data are available regarding the cross-cultural generality of their criterion validities.