Cross-Cultural Issues in Psychological Assessment: A Multistrategy Approach

Behavioral and psychological research often consists of the analysis of unobservable constructs, a compound of items whose assessment also relies on self-report measures, especially in the case of symptoms. The need for commonly shared scales in the worldwide scientific community imposes the assessment of groups in a complex comparison. Cross-cultural research on suicide risk in different contexts can strongly contribute to preventive actions in light of both personal- and cultural-specific characteristics. A common analytical strategy in cross-cultural studies consists of a straightforward juxtaposition of measures from the populations and groups involved, implying scalar equivalence. Cross-cultural analysis poses several challenges and many interrogatives from an analytical perspective. On the one hand, the efforts and advances of some methodological strategies, such as structural equation models or item-response theory, have both set a cornerstone and pushed their advances to the frontier of multigroup investigation.