Crosscultural issues in psychological assessment. A multistrategy approach.

The issue of culturally and ethnically unbiased psychological tests has been widely faced in the areas of abilities and attitudes, less so in the context of some other areas frequently relying on self-report symptom measures to assess and monitor symptom change. A very convenient situation would consist of relying on scales for which the measurement properties are consistent across groups, namely for cross-cultural bias. Measurement invariance and differential item bias are critical evidence to this aim, when comparing levels of functioning across people of different demographic characteristics and of culturally divergent groups (Poortinga, 1989). Various approaches to comparability in cross-cultural studies have been developed, a privileged psychometric approach consisting of assessing factors equivalence across several groups (Asparouhov, & Muthén, 2014). Most often, such a single strategy is adopted, satisfactorily addressing some contexts but sometimes leaving a few issues still unanswered. A multistrategy approach has been suggested, where the potential flaws of a single technique may be amended by additional methods, e.g. multidimensional scaling (Hui, & Triandis, 1985). In our study, we focused on suicide risk among youth, suicide being the fourth leading cause of death at this age, with a prevalence that varies widely worldwide. In particular, we collected data upon 1665 Italian university students (Magliocca et al., 2023) and 402 Indian ones. Applying a multistrategy statistical approach, we compared them with respect to suicidal ideation, psychological/psychiatric measures, somatic pain measures, as well as social measures.