Assessment and “The Global Research Village”: Adapting Psychological Instruments

Authors involved in adapting career assessment instruments generally recognize the meaning and nature of the pitfalls and hurdles they encounter in making a test ready for use in a foreign country, culture or language. This article discusses some major obstacles related to the sampling of situations and functions and their ecological relatedness, the compatibility between the conceptual and the operational definitions of variables, the psychometric properties of the test, and the cross-national evidence. In addition there is the question of whether the new reality of globalisation should determine a shift towards intercultural research, and whether common and regional competencies should be integrated to achieve added value and usefulness of assessment techniques?