Autonomy scores from three collectivistic cultures

Autonomy is a concept related to the capacity of a person to make decisions about their own lives. Here, the concept of the individual gains relevance because of the difference between contexts; on the one hand, in some cultures autonomy is more appreciated as in individualistic cultures, whereas other more collectivistic cultures, value more the interdependence between individuals as an important part of the self. The main goal of this study is to use an autonomy scale and compare the scores from three different collectivistic samples: People from Mexico (n=391), Nicaragua (n=273) and China (n=442), as these are three cultures among those considered more collectivistic. We used an adapted short version from Bekker and van Assen (2006) composed of 18 items. We conducted an Anova test to compare the three samples and obtained significant results on the three subscales of the instrument with medium to large effects; nonetheless, it is not very clear if the difference is due to the contexts, or if this difference can be attributed to bias variables. The internal coefficient scores for each of the subscales are low but sufficient to interpret ranging from .43 up to .65 with Cronbach’s alpha formula. We conducted a multigroup confirmatory factor analysis to test the hypothesis of configural metric and scalar invariance. The results support only the configural invariance but shows a very weak support for metric and scalar invariance; thus, we cannot discard that the significant results from these groups are due to measurement bias.