Measuring Prosocial Behaviors: Psychometric Properties and Cross-National Validation of the Prosociality Scale in Five Countries.

Bernadette Paula Luengo Kanacri,Carlo Tramontano,Antonio Zuffiano,Liqi Zhu,Concetta Pastorelli,Evangelina Regner,Maria Giovanna Caprara,Nancy Eisenberg,Gian Vittorio Caprara

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.693174

Abstract

This research investigated the psychometric properties of the Prosociality Scale and its cross-cultural validation and generalizability across five different western and non-western countries (China, Chile, Italy, Spain, and the United States). The scale was designed to measure individual differences in a global tendency to behave in prosocial ways during late adolescence and adulthood. Study 1 was designed to identify the best factorial structure of the Prosociality Scale and Study 2 tested the model’s equivalence across five countries (N = 1,630 young adults coming from China, Chile, Italy, Spain and the United States; general Mage = 21.34; SD = 3.34). Findings supported a bifactor model in which prosocial responding was characterized by a general latent factor (i.e., prosociality) and two other specific factors (prosocial actions and prosocial feelings). New evidence of construct validity of the Prosociality Scale was provided.

Highlights

Given the current mass migrations of people, often resulting in social exclusion and conflict, it is important to identify human behaviors that can foster greater cohesion among different groups in increasingly multicultural societies
Because observed composite scores for the three factors of the Prosociality Scale do not separate the unique effects of each facet from the shared variance among the facets (GPF, Prosocial actions (PA), and Prosocial feelings (PF)), individuals’ factor scores for general prosocial factor (GPF), PA and PF were calculated from the bi-factor model loadings (Sinharay and Haberman, 2007) in MPlus
Correlations of the GPF and PA with the quality of friendship were positive and significant, whereas those with aggression were negative and significant; these correlations were small to moderate in size: The correlations generally support the validity of the factors derived from the bifactor model

Summary

Introduction

Given the current mass migrations of people, often resulting in social exclusion and conflict, it is important to identify human behaviors that can foster greater cohesion among different groups in increasingly multicultural societies. Reliable measures for studying dispositional differences in prosocial behavior in late adolescence and adulthood are relatively scarce. Given the diversity of cultural groups in many societies, it is useful to develop instruments applicable for multicultural contexts and to consider issues related to measuring constructs across cultural groups. To this end, we conducted two studies designed to further examine the psychometric properties of the Prosociality Scale, and especially its generalizability across different western and non-western countries

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Conclusion