Examining the cross‐cultural validity of the positive affect and negative affect schedule between an Asian (Singaporean) sample and a Western (American) sample

Sean T. H. Lee*, Andree Hartanto, Jose C. Yong, Brandon Koh, Angela K.-y. Leung

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

12 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The positive affect and negative affect schedule (PANAS) is a popular measure of positive (PA) and negative affectivity (NA). Developed and validated in Western contexts, the 20-item scale has been frequently administered on respondents from Asian countries with the assumption of cross-cultural measurement invariance. We examine this assumption via a rigorous multigroup confirmatory factor analysis, which allows us to assess between-group differences in both strength of scale item-to-latent factor relationship (metric invariance test) and mean of each scale item (scalar invariance test), on a large sample of 1,065 respondents recruited from Singapore (Asian sample) and the United States (Western sample). We found that two items assessing PA (“excited” and “proud”) and three items assessing NA (“guilty,” “hostile,” and “ashamed”) exhibited metric noninvariance whereas 11 of the remaining metric invariant items exhibited scalar noninvariance, suggesting that the PA and NA constructs differ from what the PANAS is expected to measure for Asian respondents. Our findings serve as a cautionary note to researchers who intend to administer the PANAS in future studies as well as to researchers interpreting the results of past studies involving respondents from Asian countries.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)109-116
JournalAsian Journal of Social Psychology
Volume23
Issue number1
Early online date6 Nov 2019
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Mar 2020
Externally publishedYes

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