| Abstract: | The positive affect and negative affect schedule (PANAS) is a popular measure of positive (PA) and negative affectivity (NA). Developed and validated in Western contexts, the 20‐item scale has been frequently administered on respondents from Asian countries with the assumption of cross‐cultural measurement invariance. We examine this assumption via a rigorous multigroup confirmatory factor analysis, which allows us to assess between‐group differences in both strength of scale item‐to‐latent factor relationship (metric invariance test) and mean of each scale item (scalar invariance test), on a large sample of 1,065 respondents recruited from Singapore (Asian sample) and the United States (Western sample). We found that two items assessing PA (“excited” and “proud”) and three items assessing NA (“guilty,” “hostile,” and “ashamed”) exhibited metric noninvariance whereas 11 of the remaining metric invariant items exhibited scalar noninvariance, suggesting that the PA and NA constructs differ from what the PANAS is expected to measure for Asian respondents. Our findings serve as a cautionary note to researchers who intend to administer the PANAS in future studies as well as to researchers interpreting the results of past studies involving respondents from Asian countries. |
