We must compare apples to apples, not apples to oranges.
Cross-cultural assessments are important measures of test takers’ knowledge, skills, beliefs and/or aptitudes. Cross-cultural assessments can be used for a variety of reasons, such as screening job applicants and advancing social science research. Whether they are used for high-stakes or low-stakes purposes, however, one typical goal of creating and administering such an assessment is to compare test takers’ results across different groups. Those results should tell a meaningful story about the test takers’ knowledge, skills, beliefs and/or aptitudes. And that’s where construct equivalence comes in.
What Is Construct Equivalence?
Construct equivalence is the foundation of any cross-cultural assessment that intends to produce comparative data. Construct equivalence means that the assessment construct provides the same meaning and the same value to the target test takers across different cultural groups. A shared understanding of the construct gives test takers more equitable test conditions and test administrators the right tools to make cross-cultural comparisons. After all, it’s fair to compare apples to apples, but it’s not fair to compare apples to oranges.
One Example
Today, the most well-known example of a cross-cultural assessment is the OECD’s PISA study. Every three years the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) administers the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), where 15- and 16-year-olds are tested in mathematics, science and reading. The program provides participating countries (72 participated in 2015) with comparative data that they can use to improve their education policies. The countries allow their young citizens to be benchmarked in this way because they have confidence in the assessment’s construct equivalence.
Construct Equivalence Strategies
Construct equivalence can be achieved in different ways; however, it’s easier to build and establish construct equivalence in the assessment’s design phase rather than have to correct for it later on. Here we’ll discuss some strategies for helping to reduce construct bias and accomplish construct equivalence.
Decentering: An assessment is produced for multiple cultures simultaneously. The emphasis is on adapting a construct that will be relevant and meaningful to all. PISA, for example, uses this strategy.
Convergence: Each target culture produces an independent assessment. Then all of the assessments are administered to all of the target groups. After analysis, the final version is assembled; the idea is to draw from different sources to provide a fuller picture.
Local knowledge: The cultural expertise of informed locals and cultural experts, and their insights into the target cultures and proposed constructs, are taken into account. This is not an either-or strategy, like the previous two above, but a best practice for any type of assessment adaptation.
But how do you know if construct equivalence has been achieved? Some of the methods used to evaluate construct equivalence include cluster analysis, multidimensional scaling techniques, exploratory factor analysis and structural equation models. However, these methods are beyond the scope of this blog post.
Cultural Experts, Foreign-Language Experts
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