What's wrong with cross-cultural comparisons of subjective Likert scales?: The reference-group effect.

By Steven J. Heine, D. Lehman, Kaiping Peng, J. Greenholtz. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2002

1,087 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/edd1089eaa95609d4d4ad02068003dc86138e86a

How researchers see this paper

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In Applied Psychology

1. E. Diener
2. S. Oishi
3. Richard E. Lucas
4. Christie Napa Scollon
5. Peter B. Smith
6. R. McCrae
7. Jüri Allik
8. Ara Norenzayan

In Social Psychology

1. E. Diener
2. D. Schmitt
3. Peter B. Smith
4. Michael Minkov
5. S. Oishi
6. A. Church
7. Jüri Allik
8. Ronald Fischer

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Peter B. Smith
2. Michael Minkov
3. Jüri Allik
4. D. Schmitt
5. Ronald Fischer
6. A. Church
7. E. Diener
8. Huajian Cai

Citations in the corpus

• Self-Compassion and Self-Construal in the United States, Thailand, and Taiwan (2008, background): “Another potential confound when using Likert-type scales may stem from the referencegroup effect (Heine et al., 2002), meaning that scale respondents tend to compare the extremity of their own behavior to similar others in their reference group.”
• Implicit Theories and Self-Perceptions of Traitedness Across Cultures (2006, result): “We suspect that our Mexican university sample is fairly individualistic in comparison to more representative Mexican samples and judged themselves as high in autonomous self-expression and independent self-construals relative to their collectivistic cultural norm (Heine et al., 2002).”
• Youth Developmental Assets in Global Perspective: Results from International Adaptations of the Developmental Assets Profile (2011, background): “The DAP also asks youth in a number of questions to report on their actual behaviors, and those more concrete queries have been found to be less susceptible to the reference-group effect than questions about values or attitudes (Heine et al. 2002).”
• Self‐esteem and culture: Differences in cognitive self‐evaluations or affective self‐regard? (2007, background): “First, like all cross-cultural research, subtle differences in translation and context can influence the findings ( Heine, Lehman, Peng, & Greenholtz, 2002 ).”
• The Role of Psychological Safety in Human Development (2016, neutral): “Difference in frames of reference is also an issue across sociodemographic categories and other factors that define interindiviudual differences in developmental pathways (Heine, Lehman, Peng, & Greenholtz, 2002).”
• Personal or Interpersonal Construal of Happiness: A Cultural Psychological Perspective (2012, background): “…1995) and the reference group effect (i.e., people judge themselves based on surrounding others; individual judgment in each nation varies with their ‚reference point‛; Heine, Lehman, Peng, & Greenholtz, 2002), we have to be careful with simple mean score comparisons (e.g., Heine et al., 2002).”
• A paired comparison approach for the analysis of sets of Likert-scale responses (2007, background): “This is a particular problem when comparing different countries or cultures (Heine et al., 2002).”