Global Norms: Towards Some Guidelines for Aggregating Personality Norms Across Countries

The article discusses issues relating to the international use of personality inventories, especially those in which organizations make comparisons between people from differing cultures or countries or those with different languages. The focus is on the issue of norming and the use of national versus multinational norms. It is noted that questions related to norming are in turn dependent on a range of factors that relate to how successfully an inventory has been adapted. However, good adaptation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for determining how various different approaches to norming might operate. In practice, data from the OPQ32i indicates that between-country and between-language differences in average scale scores are generally small and less than those often associated with other factors such as gender. In the light of the data reported here and other work, some guidelines on aggregation are proposed.