The road less traveled: A cross-cultural study of the negative wording factor in multidimensional scales

Negatively worded items (NWIs) have been found to distort the hypothesized one-factor structure of many unidimensional scales and an additional negative wording factor is needed to achieve adequate model fit. However, little is known about impact, dimensionality, and correlates of the negative wording factor for multidimensional scales. Using responses to the Big Five Inventory-2 (BFI-2) administered to nationally representative samples of Germany, Spain, France, Japan, Poland, America, and England, the present study reported on a comprehensive cross-cultural examination of the impact, dimensionality, and external correlates of negative wording factors. We further investigated whether modeling a negative wording factor affects the factor structure and criterion-related validity. It was found that NWIs blurred the factor structure of the BFI-2 in non-English-speaking countries such that factors like agreeableness was not recovered, thus rejecting configural invariance. The results also strongly supported the idea that there was a general negative wording factor across subscales of the BFI-2 and this factor was consistently related to age, gender, educational attainment and life satisfaction across countries. Moreover, modeling a negative wording factor improved the factor structure of the BFI-2 and scalar invariance was achieved. Implications of these findings were discussed.