Key Dimensions and Validity of the Chinese Version of the Individualism-Collectivism Scale

Abstract

A Chinese version of the Individualism-Collectivism Scale (ICS) to assess cultural dimensions was developed and its psychometric properties were evaluated. The English version of the ICS was translated and back translated prior to its administration to 1760 participants who were divided into 5 age groups. Results indicated that the ICS-C exhibited moderate to high internal consistency with Cronbach's alpha coefficients ranging from 0.64 to 0.83. The ICS-C also exhibited strong test-retest reliability with ICCs from 0.45 to 0.80. Confirmatory factor Analyses found the four-factor model was the best fit of the data across gender and age, thus supporting the multi-dimensional perspective of horizontal and vertical individualism and collectivism. Furthermore, a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) revealed a significant main effect of age and gender. A gradual increase is present in subjective perception of societal emphasis on the cultural dimensions across five age groups, except age groups of 14 -15 and 16 -17 in vertical individualism. With respect to gender effect, female students showed a higher perception of the vertical collectivism than male students (p < 0.05). Thus, the results revealed that sufficient support for the reliability and validity of the Chinese version of ICS.

The Role of Collectivism–Individualism in Attitudes Toward Compliance and Psychological Responses During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…The original individualism and collectivism scale (ICS, Singelis et al, 1995) is a 32-item scale, and 8 items each are used to measure HI (e.g., I enjoy being unique and different from others in many ways), VI (e.g., Competition is the law of nature), HC (e.g., If a coworker gets a prize, I would feel proud), and VC (e.g., I usually sacrifice my self-interest for the benefits of my group). In this study, the 28-item version of the original scale was applied as this modified version has been validated with Chinese participants (Huang et al, 2013). Each statement was rated on a seven-point scale from "1-Strongly disagree" to "7-Strongly agree. "…”

Just wrong? Or just WEIRD? Investigating the prevalence of moral dumbfounding in non-Western samples

“…Individual differences A hierarchical linear regression was conducted to test the possible relationship between ICS (Renzhi et al, 2013) and susceptibility to dumbfounding. Susceptibility to dumbfounding was operationalized by creating a new variable representing the number of times each participant provided a dumbfounded response across the four scenarios.…”

“…The overall model did not significantly predict susceptibility to dumbfounding, R 2 = .09, F(4, 38) = 0.95, p = .488. We conducted a series of multinomial logistic regressions to investigate the possible relationship between ICS (Renzhi et al, 2013) and responding to each of the scenarios individually. Response to the critical slide scenario was the dependent variable for each scenario, and the four subscales of the ICS were included as predictor variables.…”

“…Given that this is the first study of moral dumbfounding in a non-Western setting, we additionally investigated the potential influence of culturally relevant individual differences on moral dumbfounding. A measure that is widely regarded as one of the most prominent dimensions that varies with culture is individualism/collectivism (Renzhi et al, 2013), therefore we included the individualism-collectivism scale (ICS: Li & Aksoy, 2007;Renzhi et al, 2013;Triandis & Gelfand, 2011) for exploratory purposes.…”

“…Individualism-collectivism scale Following the dumbfounding task, participants completed the individualism-collectivism scale (Renzhi et al, 2013; see Appendix E). This 16-item scale includes four subscales: Vertical Collectivism (VC), Horizontal Collectivism (HC), Vertical Individualism (VI), and Horizontal Individualism (HI).…”