The Use of Different Test Items in Nonliterate Societies

The question of whether standardized and uniformly administered items yield similar results within a particular society is of practical interest since investigators often characterize a nonliterate society on the basis of a limited number of items. In the course of a long interview in three African societies (the Ganda in Uganda, the Luo in Kenya, and the Zulu in the Union of South Africa) representative samples of male informants were given a series of projective and direct items as well as some psychological tests. When pairs of items which seemed to concern the same area of behavior were compared, some items but not others produced similar results in the same society; and the same items yielded similar results in one society but not in another