Human Assessment and Cultural Factors

Against the background of NATO's Istanbul conference of 1971 (Cronbach and Drenth, 1972), the Kingston conference shows that great progress has been made by the community of cross-cultural psychologists. The progress is as much in the psychology of the investigators as in the investigations being reported. In 1971 the investigators were mostly strangers to each other. Behind their reports lay radically different field experiences, disparate research traditions, and mutually contradictory social ideals. Istanbul was not a Tower of Babel, but participants did speak past each other. Now a community exists, thanks to the meetings of NATO and the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology, to flourishing journals, and the Triandis et a1. (1980) Handbook. The members tend to know each other, can anticipate how their formu­ lations will fallon the ears of others, and accept superficially divergent approaches as making up a collective enterprise. Ten years ago there was open conflict between those who con­ fronted exotic peoples with traditional tests and applied tradi­ tional interpretations to the responses, and the relativists who insisted that tasks, test taking, and interpretation cannot be "standardized" in the ways that matter. Today's investigators are conscious of the need to revalidate tasks carried into alien settings; they often prefer to redesign the mode of presentation and to attune the subject to test taking. They face the diffi­ culties squarely and recognize that even the best means of coping are only partially successful.

Table of Contents:
Section I. Human Assessment Worldwide.- 1. Recent Issues in Educational Selection in the Third World.- 2. Human Assessment in the Indian Context.- 3. Large-Scale Assessment of Educational Aptitude in Nigeria.- 4. Testing in Africa and America: The Search for Routes.- 5. The Assessment of Psychological Abilities and Psychologists’ Inabilities in the South Pacific.- 6. Are Western Psychological Concepts Valid in Africa? A Nigerian Review.- 7. Human Assessment — The Work of the Scottish Council for Research in Education.- 8. The Progressive Matrices and Mill Hill Vocabulary Scale in Western Societies.- Section II. Contexts of Assessment.- 9. Textured Contexts: Systems and Situations in Cross-Cultural Psychology.- 10. On the Search for the Independent Variable in Cross-Cultural Psychology.- 11. Dress Rehearsals for Psychological Performance.- 12. Context in the Assessment of Mathematical Concepts from Hunting Societies.- 13. The Child and His Environment.- 14. Rediscovering “Rote”: Some Cognitive and Pedagogical Preliminaries.- 15. Psychological Differentiation in a Rural Yucatec Mayan Village.- Section III. Assessment Trends and Issues.- 16. Studying Individual Differences in Cognitive Abilities: Implications for Cross-Cultural Studies.- 17. Psychometric Approaches to Intergroup Comparison: The Problem of Equivalence.- 18. Stalking the Wily Emic: Alternatives to Cross-Cultural Measurement.- 19. The Structure, Organization and Correlates of Cognitive Speed and Accuracy.- 20. Conditional Item Bias Methods.- 21. Continuous Work Tests: Their Scope in Cross-Cultural Contexts.- 22. Measurement of Spatial Abilities: Some Comments Prompted by Cross-Cultural Studies.- Section IV. Assessing Personality and Motivation.- 23. The Cross-Cultural Use of Personality Tests.- 24. ADynamic Research Strategy for Universals in the Motivation and Personality Domain.- 25. The Cross-Cultural Generalizability of Personality Construct Measures.- 26. Personality Measurement: Do the Scales Have Similar Meanings in Another Culture?.- 27. A Measurement Study of Test Anxiety Emphasizing its Evaluative Context.- 28. Antecedents to Emotions Across Cultures.- 29. The Cross-Cultural Assessment of Coping Skills.- 30. Students’ Perception of What Causes Their Achievement in School.- 31. Comparisons of Self-Concept Scores of Children in America and Taiwan.- Section V. Assessing Attitudes and Social Behaviour.- 32. The Cross-Cultural Assessment of Normative Concepts: Some Considerations of the Affinity between Methodological Approaches and Preferred Theories.- 33. Assessment of Values and Attitudes in the Study of Fertility: Problems and Prospects.- 34. The Use of Ambiguous Photographic Stimuli in the Assessment of Attitudes to Children and Family Size in South Asia.- 35. Issues in the Assessment of Attitudes in Pre- and Marginally-Literate Cultures.- 36. Attitudes and Action: The Problem of Child Abuse in Kenya.- 37. The Benefits of Close Intercultural Relationships.- 38. Assessing the Patterns and Experience of Viewing Television.- Section VI. Assessment in Organizations.- 39. Cross-Cultural Organizational Psychology: Challenges and Limitations.- 40. Estimating Causes of Ethnic Differences in the Effects of Schooling.- 41. Cross-Cultural Testing within a Multicultural Society.- 42. Cognitive Style and Language Performance of Nigerian Secondary School Students.- 43. Assessment of Spoken English Language Problems of Non-Native English Speakers.- 44. A Picture Vocabulary Test for the Eastern James Bay Cree.- 45. A Longitudinal Study in Predicting SchoolPerformances in Tanzania.- Author Index.