Assessment of Migrants’, Refugees’ and Asylum Seekers’ Hard Skills: Cultural Adaptation and Psychometric Properties of the NADINE Hard Skill Tests

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The present paper aims at presenting the development of the NADINE Hard Skill Tests for migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. The NADINE tests are assessing the following skills: Observation, Language learning aptitude, Numeracy, Accuracy, Mechanical, ICT skill, Decision making, Problem solving, Dexterity, Spatial ability, Cognitive/analytical skills and Technical skills. The paper focuses on the linguistic and cultural adaptation and equivalency of the English, Farsi, French, Arabic and Spanish versions of the tests. To determine the degree to which the items, the response scale and the instructions are comprehensible and culturally relevant to the target population, four focus groups were formed, rating all items in terms of clarity and cultural relevance. The review resulted in minor changes. Furthermore, the Farsi, Arabic and French versions of the tests were administered to 120 migrants/refugees/asylum seekers and we calculated the difficulty level of each item and its contribution to the scale’s internal reliability coefficient. Items with extremely low or high difficulty level and items that reduced reliability were eliminated. The remaining items had difficulty levels between 0.20 and 0.80 (with few exceptions), while all reliability coefficients were above 0.70 (the vast majority being above 0.80). Finally, the new versions of the test were administered to 427 participants and factor analyses were conducted to ensure that each test was measuring only one factor. Moreover, we calculated Tucker’s congruence coefficient for each test to ensure cross-cultural equivalency. All Tucker’s phi coefficients were above the 0.90 cut-off point. Results of this study support the case of linguistic and cultural equivalence between the different language versions of the tests, which constitute the NADINE Hard Skill Tests valid and reliable instruments that can be used by career practitioners to accurately assess the skills of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers.