Scholars study representative international surveys to understand cross-cultural differences in mentality patterns, which are measured via complex multi-item constructs. Methodologists in this field insist with increasing vigor that detecting “non-invariance” in how a construct’s items associate with each other in different national samples is an infallible sign of encultured in-equivalences in how respondents understand the items. Questioning this claim, we demonstrate that a main source of non-invariance is the arithmetic of closed-ended scales in the presence of sample mean disparity. Since arithmetic principles are culture-unspecific, the non-invariance that these principles enforce in statistical terms is inconclusive of encultured in-equivalences in semantic terms. Because of this inconclusiveness, our evidence reveals furthermore that non-invariance is inconsequential for the cross-cultural functioning of multi-item constructs as concerns their nomological linkages to other variables of interest. We discuss the implications of these insights for measurement validation in cross-cultural settings with large sample mean disparity.

学者们研究了代表性的国际调查，以了解心态模式的跨文化差异，这些差异是通过复杂的多项目结构来衡量的。该领域的方法论者以越来越大的活力坚持认为，在不同国家样本中检测出构造物之间如何相互关联的“不变性”，是被访者如何理解这些物的文化不平等的可靠标志。质疑这一说法，我们证明了非不变性的主要来源是在样本均值不均的情况下，封闭式量表的算术运算。由于算术原理是不特定文化的，因此这些原理以统计术语强制执行的不变性是不确定的语义术语中的文化不等式。由于这种不确定性，我们的证据进一步表明，对于多项目构造的跨文化功能，就其与其他感兴趣变量的经济学联系而言，不变性是无关紧要的。我们讨论了这些见解对于跨文化环境中具有较大样本均值差异的测量验证的含义。