The Effect of Scale Tailoring for Cross-Cultural Application on Scale Reliability and Construct Validity

Abstract

This article summarizes main findings from a two-step investigation about the effects of tailoring a scale with etic and emic items and extreme-response styles on the validity and reliability of scores. The Career Decision-Making Self-Efficacy scale was chosen, and its Spanish version was tailored with translated items, adapted items, and newly developed items. The tailored scale was administered to two independent samples of high school students from Mexico. Reliability estimates for the emic and etic scales were marginally different between them and with respect to those for the English language. Tailoring a scale with the best etic and emic items neither improved on the recovery of the five-dimension structure nor reduced the effects of the extreme response style variable.