CROSS-CULTURAL ISSUES IN PERSONALITY AND CAREER ASSESSMENT

The purpose of this article is to discuss some important issues regarding cross-cultural personality and career assessment. Within the last decade, this topic has received increased attention because of a growing awareness of the cultural bias inherent in many of our major personality assessment instruments (e.g., Dana; 1993, Marsella & Kameoka, 1989). The present article is divided into four major sections. The first section discusses the importance of the cross-cultural perspective in psychology and discusses such issues as reducing ethnocentric bias in psychology through the use of comparative cultural studies and culturally sensitive research methods. This section also includes a brief discussion of the concepts of ethnocentricity, culture, and ethnocultural identity, all of which are essential for understanding the assessment of personality across cultures. The second section discusses the complex relationships between culture and personality, including the possibility that the very concept of personality may be culturally constructed. The third section discusses some of the conceptual and methodological issues involved in personality assessment across cultures, with a special emphasis on psychometric equivalency (i.e., linguistic, conceptual, scale, and normative) across cultures. The fourth section provides a conceptual framework for integrating the cross-cultural issues of personality assessment to career assessment.