Towards meaningful comparisons of personality in large-scale cross-cultural studies

One of Jüri Allik’s major, pioneering contributions to psychology is the assessment of personality across numerous cultures. His contributions have inspired many other large collaborations of international researchers to move beyond early work confirming the Five Factor Model cross-culturally to assessing the reliability and validity of a broad range of personality traits. Cross-cultural comparisons of personality traits may be problematic if measures have unique meanings in different cultural contexts that influence how individuals respond to items. In this chapter we present a new and relatively simple method for assessing the comparability of measures in large-scale cross-cultural studies, and illustrate the method using responses to the Big Five Inventory-2 (BFI-2) from 15,368 participants in 63 countries participating in the International Situations Project.