Adaptation of a Cultural Measure in Brazil – Developing a Short Version of the Individualism–Collectivism Vertical–Horizontal Scale

Abstract

We report psychometric analyses of an adapted version of the measure of individualism–collectivism (IC) and its horizontal–vertical (HV) manifestations ( Singelis et al., 1995 ) for Brazilian samples. We used a large sample ( N = 1,669) split into an exploratory and two cross-validation samples. Using confirmatory factor analysis and a new metaheuristic machine learning approach inspired by ant colony foraging, we found poor psychometric properties. We developed and compared three short scales, which showed poor reliability and poor factor structures. Considering widely used short scales of this measure, our results suggest that key items may be understood differently by Brazilians, and we urge caution in interpreting individualism–collectivism scores with Brazilian samples. We discuss issues for further developing cultural orientation scales to measure individual differences and the utility of an advanced metaheuristic data-driven approach for psychometric research.