Cross-cultural Equivalence of the PISA Student Questionnaire

Abstract

In this study, cross-lingual and cross-cultural equivalence of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2006 Student Questionnaire was assessed comparatively across Turkey,the United States of America, Australia, and New Zealand samples. At the first stage of this study, thefactor structure of the questionnaire constructs was examined using Confirmatory Factor Analysis(CFA). At the second stage, Multi-Group Confirmatory Factor Analyses (MG-CFA) based on Meanand Covariance Structures (MACS; Sörbom, 1974) were conducted in order to determine whether thequestionnaire items exhibit differential item functioning (DIF) across different cultures or languages.At the last stage, causes of DIF were identified by expert judgments. CFA results showed that themeasurement model had the same factor structure across samples. MG-CFA results indicatedthat some items exhibited DIF between countries. It is observed that as the linguistic and culturaldifferences increased between countries, the number of DIF items increased. The main reasons forDIF were found to be due to poor translation and differences in cultural relevance.