RESPONSE STYLE AND CROSS-CULTURAL COMPARISONS OF RATING-SCALES AMONG EAST-ASIAN AND NORTH-AMERICAN STUDENTS

This report examines cross-cultural differences in response style regarding the use of rating scales. Subjects were high school students: 944 from Sendai (Japan), 1,357 from Taipei (Taiwan), 687 from Edmonton and Calgary (Canada), and 2,174 from the Minneapolis metropolitan area and Fairfax County, Virginia. Responses to fifty-seven 7-point Likert-type scales were analyzed. The Japanese and Chinese students were more likely than the two North American groups to use the midpoint on the scales; the U.S. subjects were more likely than the other three groups to use the extreme values. Within each cultural group, endorsement of individualism was positively related to the use of extreme values and negatively related to the use of the midpoint. These small, albeit statistically significant, differences in response styles generally did not alter cross-cultural comparisons of item means.