CROSS-CULTURAL ISSUES IN PERSONALITY AND CAREER ASSESSMENT

The purpose of this article is to discuss some important issues regard ing cross-cultural personality and career assessment. Within the last decade, this topic has received increased attention because of a growi ng awareness of the cultural bias inherent in many of our major person ality assessment instruments (e.g., Dana; 1993, Marsella & Kameoka, 19 89). The present article is divided into four major sections. The firs t section discusses the importance of the cross-cultural perspective i n psychology and discusses such issues as reducing ethnocentric bias i n psychology through the use of comparative cultural studies and cultu rally sensitive research methods. This section also includes a brief d iscussion of the concepts of ethnocentricity, culture, and ethnocultur al identity, all of which are essential for understanding the assessme nt of personality across cultures. The second section discusses the co mplex relationships between culture and personality, including the pos sibility that the very concept of personality may be culturally constr ucted. The third section discusses some of the conceptual and methodol ogical issues involved in personality assessment across cultures, with a special emphasis on psychometric equivalency (i.e., linguistic, con ceptual, scale, and normative) across cultures. The fourth section pro vides a conceptual framework for integrating the cross-cultural issues of personality assessment to career assessment.