Let's Compare Apples and Oranges! A Plea to Demystify Measurement Equivalence

The article discusses measurement equivalence in quantitative cross-cultural studies. Most often instruments are translated, data are gathered for the various language versions, and psychometric equivalence is checked. Items regarded as equivalent are retained, the other items are discarded. More culturally inclusive approaches formulate items independently in different cultures, translate them to a Lingua Franca, retain translatable items, gather data, check equivalence, and discard nonequivalent items. Here, a more radical approach to retaining local (emic) items is proposed. Instrument developers in different cultures agree on a construct for which they develop items independently, gather data without translating them, perform exploratory factor analysis, and order the items according to their loadings on the first factor. The data are then combined and equivalence is analyzed. In this way for each culture the emicly most appropriate items are included, semantic sameness is given up, but measurement equivalence remains open for analysis.