IDENTIFYING CULTURAL-DIFFERENCES IN ITEMS AND TRAITS - DIFFERENTIAL ITEM FUNCTIONING IN THE NEO PERSONALITY-INVENTORY

The authors investigated the cross-cultural measurement equivalence of items in the English-language version of the NEO Personality Inventor y, a measure of the five-factor personality model, in a different cult ural context in which English is a language of instruction. The item r esponses of 432 Filipino and 610 American college students were analyz ed. Three methods for detecting differential item functioning (DIF)-tw o based on item response theory-plus the Mantel-Haenszel method showed fairly good agreement in the detection of DIF items. Nearly 40% of th e 180 items showed DIE Several significant cultural mean differences t hat were found with the original raw scores were no longer significant when the authors analyzed ''purified'' scales obtained by deleting DI F items.