Evaluating the Construct Equivalence of International Employee Opinion Surveys. Laboratory of Psychometric and Evaluative Research Report No. 379.

Assessing people who operate in different languages necessitates the use of multiple language versions of an assessment. However, different language versions of an assessment are not necessarily equivalent. In this paper, the psychometric properties of different language versions on an international employee attitude survey are evaluated. This survey was administered to more than 50,000 employees of a large telecommunications company using both paper-and-pencil and Web administration formats. The structural equivalence of the survey was evaluated across language versions, cultural groups, and administration formats using multidimensional scaling. The statistical equivalence of English, French, and Spanish versions of the survey items was evaluated using analysis of covariance. The results indicate the structure of the survey is consistent across the groups studied, and that the different language versions of the items functioned similarly. The implications of the results for future research in this area are discussed. (Contains 3 figures, 4 tables, and 38 references.) (Author/SLD)