An Indigenous Measure of Social Desirability Across Non-Western Countries

Cross-cultural differences in Social Desirability (SD) could be partly due to the nonequivalence of constructs, items, or other challenges of cross-cultural research. We tested to what extent a Mexican, indigenous scale of SD, capturing both positive and negative features of SD, would be useful in other countries. Data were collected in convenience samples in eight countries (Argentina, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Lebanon, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Spain) in order to test the psychometric accuracy and invariance of the factor structure. Values of Tucker’s factor congruence coefficients (gauging invariance) and tests of the similarity of the cross-country similarity of Cronbach’s alpha (gauging internal consistency) revealed that SD, as measured by this indigenous list, is stable and comparable across cultures. The results are interpreted in a conceptual framework in which SD is viewed as a culturally embedded communication style that people use to integrate successfully into their groups

BIM aplicado al patrimonio cultural

La asociación buildingSMART tiene como principal objetivo fomentar la eficacia en el sector de la construcción a través del uso de estándares abiertos de interoperabilidad con la metodología BIM (Building InformationMode-ling). Para ello, cuenta con una estructura de grupos de trabajo a nivel internacional para abordar diferentes cues-tiones al respecto. Sin embargo, en el ámbito del Patrimonio Cultural, no existe en la actualidad una aproximación internacional sobre el uso de BIM, y es por lo que buildingSMART Spanish Chapter ha puesto en marcha un grupo de trabajo abierto, denominado LEGEND–HBIM, y que está centrado en BIM aplicado al Patrimonio Cultural. De este modo, buildingSMART Spanish Chapter continua la laborde promover el uso de la metodología BIM a través de guías como esta, que supone una continuación de las guías uBIM publicadas en el año 2014

Evaluation of the convergence between "self-reporters" and "proxies" in a disability questionnaire by means of behaviour coding method

Household surveys often require including proxy reporters to obtain information about other household members who cannot be interviewed. The participation of proxies can undermine survey data quality due to the fact that proxies must respond to questions thinking about other people. The objectives of the present study were to analyze the behaviour of proxy reporters and evaluate the convergence between the answers given by proxies and self-reporters by means of behaviour coding. This improves the evaluation of convergence, since only adequate (i.e., interpretable) answers given by both types of informant are taken into account. Responses to a disability questionnaire employed by an official statistical institute were analyzed. The questionnaire includes 11 questions about different limitations related to everyday activities. 16 self-reporter and 16 proxies formed 16 couples whose members lived together and supported a direct family relation. The results show a high percentage (52%) of convergence between both types of informant, although fluctuating across the questions and the couples. Proxies showed relatively more adequate behaviour during the interaction than self-reporters. From this we conclude that proxies can be considered at least as good informants as self-reporters from an interviewer-respondent interaction perspective. Future research should address the impact of proxy responses on survey validity