Global Validity of Assessments: Location and Currency Effects

As assessments are used in an increasingly multicultural and connected world, there is a growing need to verify that they are equally valid across different populations. More specifically, when using hiring assessments to select people for jobs, it is important to corroborate that direct comparisons of individuals from different populations are valid, leading to fair and accurate hires. Populations differ in many interesting ways, but in this chapter, we examined how cultural group differences affect assessment behavior. Thus, we set out to disentangle the effects of location and currency, as elements of cultural behavior, on constructs used in hiring assessments: fairness, altruism, and decision-making speed. These constructs are measured in our gamified implementation of the Trust Game (Berg et al. (Games Econ Behav 10:122-142, 1995)) and Dictator Game (Savin and Sefton (Games Econ Behav 6:347-369, 1994)). We had data from job candidates in many world regions, who responded in various languages and game money currencies. Using this, we tested the factorial invariance of the measures from the two games. We compared large groups across different regions (controlling for language and currency), namely the United States and China, and across different currencies(controlling for language and region), specifically euros and reales. While the general factor structure held across all groups, we found differences in the observed variables, which varied by group. The findings highlight the importance of considering cultural influences when interpreting assessment results and underscore the significance of measurement invariance in promoting fairness and accuracy in hiring processes.