Cross-cultural constructs are assumed to have commonalities across cultural groups and settings.
Therefore, the instruments needed to assess cross-cultural constructs comprising locally meaningful phenomena.
Cross-cultural constructs differ from pure Western psychiatric constructs in that the former assume there is a shared meaning across cultures.
Types of constructs to be measured can be divided into three categories: local constructs, Western psychiatric constructs, and cross-cultural constructs.
For our study, we chose the psychiatric categories of depression and PTSD, with the view that they can operate as cross-cultural constructs salient for Nepali populations and be interpreted easily by international academic and humanitarian donor audiences.
For the second question " What is the construct to be measured?", the purpose dictated employing cross-cultural constructs that were locally salient and sufficiently resembling the psychiatric categories of depression and PTSD.
We used advanced psychometric techniques – confirmatory factor analysis and item response models, as well as concurrent validity and calibration with clinical diagnosis to evaluate cross-cultural construct validity.
The results obtained were similar to those reported in the Brazilian study, which implies that VAWI has good cross-cultural construct validity and internal reliability in an adult female population.
In contrast, a screening or treatment response study could use a local or cross-cultural construct and the external criterion for validation could be the risk of exposure to a traumatic event [ 14] or functional impairment [ 34].
In this work, we report data on construct validity and cross cultural applicability of the revised Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI R) (Cloninger, C.R., Przybeck, T.R., Svrakic, D.M., & Wetzel, R.D. (1999).
This scale has been shown to have adequate construct and discriminant validity [ 5], high internal consistency [ 5, 6], cross cultural validity [ 7] as well as sensitivity and sound test-retest reliability over 2 months (rt-rt = 0.83) [ 8].
