International comparisons through simultaneous and conjunct analysis: a search for general relationships across countries

The results presented here indicated that it was not unreasonable to assume that factor loadings and factor correlations should be invariant across the eight countries. When item uniquenesses were set to be invariant, a decrease in fit according to the RNI and TLI was observed. The PRNI, in contrast, showed the highest value for the model in which invariance was assumed for all parameters in the model. The overall superiority of the no invariance model, however, suggests that while the parcels and items which were used to form indicators demonstrate consistently high loadings on their respective factors across all groups, there are detectable variations across the different cultures. Perhaps it is not surprising that different passages would elicit at least some degree of idiosyncratic responses from different cultural groups.