Date of Award
5-2012
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Legacy Department
Industrial and Organizational Psychology
Committee Chair/Advisor
Rosopa, Patrick J
Committee Member
Moore , DeWayne
Committee Member
Raymark , Patrick H
Committee Member
Taylor , Mary Anne
Abstract
Early personality research often described behavior in terms of individual dispositions or stable behavioral tendencies (Allport, 1937; Cattell, 1957; Guilford, 1959), thus taking a context-independent view of personality. However, a recent review of thousands of empirical studies illustrated that even seemingly superficial changes to contextual variables can have a large impact on study results (Richard, Bond, & Stokes-Zoota, 2003). Yet, the use of non-contextualized measures of individual culture still remains the norm in cross-cultural research. Thus, utilizing a sample of more than 1,000 participants across two studies, work and nonwork measures of two cultural variables (i.e., individualism and collectivism) were developed using a frame-of-reference approach (Wright & Mischel, 1987). In Study 1, items were selected based on an examination of the psychometric properties of each scale, and in Study 2, the newly developed scales were cross-validated, and construct validity evidence was presented. Many of the cross-domain correlations for these contextualized measures were small to moderate, thereby providing support for the contextual dependence of these constructs. As frame-of-reference effects have rarely been considered in the measurement of cultural variables, this work adds incrementally to the extant literature. As such, study implications and future research directions are discussed.
Recommended Citation
Schroeder, Amber, "They were Framed! The Development and Validation of Context-Specific Measures of Individual Culture" (2012). All Dissertations. 950.
https://open.clemson.edu/all_dissertations/950