Indigenous Approaches to Testing and Assessment

This chapter discusses the need for culturally relevant tools for testing and assessment in non-Western countries, where it has been a common practice to adopt and translate psychological tests originally developed in Western countries. This etic approach assumes that Western theories and tools are universally applicable. Apart from the challenges of establishing equivalence between the original Western tests and the translated tests, the etic approach has been queried on the lack of relevance of some universal constructs that may be imposed on the local population. The indigenization movement in psychology arose in response to the imposed etic approach. Several indigenization responses in cognitive and personality assessment are presented to illustrate the introduction of emic constructs and measures. Using the combined emic-etic approach, two large-scale indigenous personality measures have been developed in China and South Africa: the Cross-cultural (Chinese) Personality Assessment Inventory (CPAI) and the South African Personality Inventory (SAPI).