Short Forms of the Cross-Cultural (Chinese) Personality Assessment Inventory: Reliability, Validity, and Measurement Invariance Across Gender.

Mingjie Zhou,Weiqi Mu,Fugui Li,Fen Ren,Fanny M. Cheung,Duan Huang,Jianxin Zhang,Weiqiao Fan

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.709032

Abstract

Filling out long questionnaires can be frustrating, unpleasant, and discouraging for respondents to continue. This is why shorter forms of long instruments are preferred, especially when they have comparable reliability and validity. In present study, two short forms of the Cross-cultural (Chinese) Personality Assessment Inventory (CPAI-2) were developed and validated. The items of the short forms were all selected from the 28 personality scales of the CPAI-2 based on the norm sample. Based on some priori criteria, we obtained the appropriate items and constructed the 56-item Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory (CPAI) and the 28-item CPAI. Then, we examined the factor structure of both short forms with Exploratory SEM (ESEM) and replicated the four-factor structure of the original CPAI-2, reflecting the four personality domains of Chinese people, namely, Social Potency, Dependability, Accommodation, and Interpersonal Relatedness. Further analyses with ESEM models demonstrate full measurement invariance across gender for both short forms. The results show that females score lower than males on Social Potency. In addition, these four factors of both short forms have adequate internal consistency, and the correlation patterns of the four factors, the big five personality traits, and several health-related variables are extremely similar across the two short forms, reflecting adequate and comparable criterion validity, convergent validity, and discriminant validity. Overall, the short versions of CPAI-2 are psychometrically acceptable and have practically implications for measuring Chinese personality and cross-cultural research.

Highlights

Lengthy, time-consuming questionnaires may evoke impatience or frustration in respondents, leading to temporary measurement errors and increasing the likelihood of careless responses, withdrawal from data collection, and refusal to further participation (Schmidt et al, 2003; Donnellan et al, 2006)
The mean of the squared part-whole correlations is 0.855. These results suggest that the 28-item Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory (CPAI) is about 15% less reliable than the 56-item CPAI
We found correlations of 1.000 for Social Potency, 1.000 for Dependability, 0.999 for Accommodation, and 0.993 for Interpersonal Relatedness, suggesting that the 28-item CPAI is almost identical with the 56-item CPAI in terms of the relationship between the domains and the criterion variables

Summary

Introduction

Time-consuming questionnaires may evoke impatience or frustration in respondents, leading to temporary measurement errors and increasing the likelihood of careless responses, withdrawal from data collection, and refusal to further participation (Schmidt et al, 2003; Donnellan et al, 2006). Brief measures within the framework of the big five model have become increasingly available and shorter, including the 60-item NEO five-factor inventory (NEO-FFI, Costa and McCrae, 1992), the 44-item Big Five Inventory (BFI, John et al, 2008), the 30-item BFI-2-S and 15-item BFI-2-XS (Soto and John, 2017a), the 20-item Mini International Personality Item Pool (Donnellan et al, 2006), and even the 10-item short version of BFI (Rammstedt and John, 2007). As a theory derived in western society, the big five model may include specific traits that are more valued in western societies than in non-western societies (Church, 2001), or it may not include some traits that are more prominent in non-western societies than in western societies To avoid these blind spots, Cheung et al (2011) proposed the combined etic-emic approach that can take into account both cultural-specific (indigenous) and cultural-universal personality traits. Several forms are developed, namely, the Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory (CPAI, Cheung et al, 1996), the Cross-Cultural (Chinese) Personality Assessment Inventory (CPAI-2, Cheung et al, 2008), and the Cross-cultural (Chinese) Personality Assessment Inventory for Adolescents (CPAI-A, Cheung et al, 2008)

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion