A Cross-Cultural Analysis of the WISC-III

This chapter describes the cross-cultural analysis of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children—Third Edition (WISC-III) data presented in the country chapters of Part II. The reader is also referred to Chapters 17 and 18 for a description of the theoretical and methodological background of this chapter. Three different types of analyses are reported. The first section addresses the structural equivalence of the subtests. The question examined here is the extent that the factor structure of the WISC-III is similar across countries. The analysis is based on the idea that similarity of factor structure across groups (i.e., structural equivalence; Van de Vijver & Leung, 1997) is indicative of the similarity of psychological structures involved in the different cultural groups to solve the WISC-III test items. The second section employs Item Response Theory (IRT; Fischer & Molenaar, 1995; Hambleton & Swaminathan, 1985; Hambleton, Swaminathan, & Rogers, 1991) to manage the subtest data that were not identical in all countries. About 10% of the items are adapted, which precludes a direct score comparison across cultures. The use of IRT enables us to estimate mean ability level of each cultural group,even when not all stimuli are identical. The third section explores the relationships between these average scores at the country level and the ecocultural indices of Affluence and Education.