Page 106 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

84 David Matsumoto, Seung Hee Yoo and Jeffrey A. LeRoux

items based on the ideas gleaned from our examination of many existing scales,
and also constructed our own items. This resulted in the initial development of
193 items.
One issue that arose early in this work was whether this test would be devel-
oped for any sojourner of any cultural background, or for those from a single
culture. We opted for the latter, assuming that it would be more beneficial to cre-
ate and validate a measure that has as high a predictive validity as possible for
one cultural group, rather than develop a general measure at the sacrifice of pre-
dictive validity. The development of a culture-general measure would require
the testing of people from multiple home cultures in multiple host cultures,
which would be practically infeasible. Moreover a culture-specific measure
could serve as the platform for similar method development in other cultures.
Thus, we focused on Japanese sojourners and immigrants, because of the litera-
ture in the area and our own expertise with this culture.
Because we were concerned about the cross-cultural equivalence of the 193
items, had to take into account that respondents might have different English
language capabilities, and had to remove any colloquialism and difficulty of
wording, two researchers created the items, reviewing and modifying all items
in terms of language and style, rendering the wording appropriate for Japanese
students who might possess a limited selection of English idioms commonly in
use. Two Japanese research assistants then reviewed the items, ensuring that
they were understandable to native Japanese. Items that depended for their util-
ity on a cultural value in which Japanese and U.S. culture differed were ex-
cluded. In all cases, items were written to adapt the cultural meaning of an item
in the United States to the same cultural context from a Japanese perspective.
To date many studies have demonstrated the internal, temporal, and parallel
forms reliability, and convergent, predictive, and incremental validity of the
ICAPS to predict intercultural adjustment (Matsumoto et al. 2001, 2003a,
2004). Early on we decreased the number of items from 193 to 55, based on each
item’s empirical ability to predict intercultural adjustment. Items having little or
nothing to do with intercultural adjustment were eliminated, even if elsewhere
they reliably measured an aspect of an underlying psychological skill (e.g.
openness) that was theoretically related to adjustment. Also, some items pre-
dicted adjustment better than others; thus, only items that predicted adjustment
the best, according to empirical criteria, were retained. Although the ICAPS
was originally developed for use with the Japanese, our studies have also shown
that it predicts adjustment in immigrants from all around the world, including
India, Sweden, Central and South America, suggesting that it taps a pancultural
set of psychological skills relevant to intercultural adjustment.