Is It Content or Style? An Evaluation of Two Competitive Measurement Models Applied to a Balanced Set of Ethnocentrism Items

Abstract

Attitude surveys often use sets of items with identical response scales (e.g., in Likert format) in order to formulate attitude constructs. There is considerable evidence that such a response format can be susceptible to acquiescence bias (i.e., the tendency to agree with survey questions). The specification of a style factor (acquiescence) in measurement models can result in well-fitted factorial invariant models for cross-cultural surveys. Attempts to model acquiescence are confronted with the phenomenon that models with a positive and a negative factor appear to be as likely as models with a bipolar factor and a style factor. We will evaluate the two competitive measurement models, applied to a balanced set of ethnocentrism items from the 1999 Religious and Moral Pluralism (RAMP) dataset. It is argued that the competing measurement models should be evaluated in the context of a theoretically meaningful nomological network.