Psychological Importance Item Level Analyses

Summaly

In this chapter we studied the psychological importance data at the level of individual items. An examination of the degree of similarity in the ratings between pairs of countries indicated wide variation, with the greatest similarity found between the United States and Australia and the lowest similarity found between Hong Kong and Germany. The mean common variance across all pairs of comparisons was approximately 25 percent. Factor analysis was employed to compose two clusters of countries, with the first consisting of countries relatively high in socioeconomic development and individualism and the second cluster consisting of countries relatively low in socioeconomic development and high in collectivism. We examined the relationship between ratings of psychological importance and language-specific favorability ratings in 15 countries. By pooling the data across all 20 countries, we identified item sets which were high or low in psychological importance on a pancultural basis.