| Abstract: | Intercultural sensitivity is a concept that is frequently viewed as important in both theoretical analyses of people's adjustment to other cultures and in applied programs to prepare people to live and work effectively in cultures other than their own. Attempts to measure this concept have not always been successful, and one reason is that researchers and practitioners have not specified exactly what people should be sensitive to when they find themselves in other cultures. In the present study, scales were designed to measure intercultural sensitivity by examining (a) people's understanding of the different ways they can behave depending upon whether they are interacting in an individualistic or a collectivist culture, (b) their open-mindedness concerning the differences they encounter in other cultures, and (c) their flexibility concerning behaving in unfamiliar ways that are called upon by the norms of other cultures. A 46-item Intercultural Sensitivity Inventory (ICSI) was developed and tested among participants at the East-West Center in Hawaii and among graduate students in an MBA program who were contemplating careers in international business. The scoring of the items dealing with individualism and collectivism was different than for most measuring instruments. People indicated whether they would engage in certain behaviors (e.g., disagreeing with others openly) in an individualistic country such as the United States, and whether they would engage in the same behavior in a collectivistic country such as Japan. This allowed scoring based on people's sensitivity to the different behaviors considered appropriate in the two types of cultures. Results indicated that the instrument had adequate reliability (r = .84 for the East-West Center sample) and validity. People with high scores on the ICSI instrument were chosen as most able to interact effectively across cultures by a panel of experts; enjoyed working on complex tasks that demanded extensive intercultural interaction; enjoyed engaging in other intercultural activities such as eating different ethnic foods; and had spent long periods of time (more than three years) living in another culture. A factor analysis of ICSI showed that the concepts of individualism and collectivism as envisioned by previous researchers (e.g., Triandis, Hofstede, Schwartz) were constructs that people used in thinking about behavior in their own and other cultures. A practical conclusion for the content of cross-cultural training programs is that people can be encouraged to modify specific behaviors so that they are appropriate to the culture in which they find themselves and so that they will have a greater chance of achieving their goals. |
