Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
3-2020
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
Keywords
cross-cultural comparison, measurement invariance, multigroup confirmatory factor analysis, negative affect, PANAS, positive affect
Discipline
American Studies | Asian Studies | Clinical Psychology
Research Areas
Psychology
Publication
Asian Journal of Social Psychology
Volume
23
Issue
1
First Page
109
Last Page
116
ISSN
1367-2223
Identifier
10.1111/ajsp.12390
Publisher
Wiley: 12 months
Citation
LEE, Sean Teck Hao, HARTANTO, Andree, YONG, Jose C., KOH, Brandon, & LEUNG, Angela K. Y..(2020). Examining the cross-cultural validity of the positive affect and negative affect schedule between an Asian (Singaporean) sample and a Western (American) sample. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 23(1), 109-116.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3041
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1111/ajsp.12390