THE ASSESSMENT OF OPTIMISTIC SELF-BELIEFS - COMPARISON OF THE GERMAN,SPANISH, AND CHINESE VERSIONS OF THE GENERAL SELF-EFFICACY SCALE

General self-efficacy is measured by a widely used parsimonious ten-it em scale that was developed for use in several cultures. The present p aper compares the verions that were examined in samples of 430 German, 959 Costa Rican, and 293 Chinese university students. The internal co nsistencies were .84,.81, and .91, respectively. The unidimensional na ture of the scale was replicated in all samples. Multilingual item-pat tern equivalence was only moderately supported by confirmatory factor analyses. Mean differences of sum scores between languages were found. Moreover, an interaction between gender and language emerged. Correla tions with depression, anxiety, and optimism provided some further evi dence for construct validity.