Examining the influence of culture on personality and its unbiased assessment is the main subject of cross‐cultural personality research. Recent large‐scale studies exploring personality differences across cultures share substantial methodological and psychometric shortcomings that render it difficult to differentiate between method and trait variance. One prominent example is the implicit assumption of cross‐cultural measurement invariance in personality questionnaires. In the rare instances where measurement invariance across cultures was tested, scalar measurement invariance—which is required for unbiased mean‐level comparisons of personality traits—did not hold. In this article, we present an item sampling procedure, ant colony optimization, which can be used to select item sets that satisfy multiple psychometric requirements including model fit, reliability, and measurement invariance. We constructed short scales of the IPIP‐NEO‐300 for a group of countries that are culturally similar (USA, Australia, Canada, and UK) as well as a group of countries with distinct cultures (USA, India, Singapore, and Sweden). In addition to examining factor mean differences across countries, we provide recommendations for cross‐cultural research in general. From a methodological perspective, we demonstrate ant colony optimization's versatility and flexibility as an item sampling procedure to derive measurement invariant scales for cross‐cultural research. © 2020 The Authors. European Journal of Personality published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Association of Personality Psychology

中文翻译：

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运用蚁群算法在跨文化人格评估中测量不变量表

考察文化对人格的影响及其公正的评估是跨文化人格研究的主要课题。最近的大规模研究探索了跨文化的人格差异，它们在方法学和心理计量学上均存在重大缺陷，这使得很难区分方法和特质差异。一个突出的例子是人格问卷中跨文化测量不变性的隐含假设。在极少数情况下，对跨文化的测量不变性进行了测试，没有标量测量不变性（这是人格特质的无偏均值比较所必需的）。在本文中，我们介绍了一个项目抽样程序，蚁群优化，可以用来选择满足多种心理要求的项目集，包括模型拟合，可靠性和测量不变性。我们为文化相似的一组国家（美国，澳大利亚，加拿大和英国）以及文化不同的一组国家（美国，印度，新加坡和瑞典）构建了小规模的IPIP-NEO-300 。除了检查各个国家的因素均值差异外，我们还为跨文化研究提供总体建议。从方法论的角度来看，我们证明了蚁群优化的多功能性和灵活性，作为一种项目抽样程序，可以得出跨文化研究的测量不变量表。©2020作者。《欧洲人格杂志》，约翰·威利＆