The scale of personal conceptions of intelligence: A comparison of the Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian versions

Abstract

Background: The aim of this research project was to conduct studies of confirmatory factor analyses of ECPI (Scale of Personal Conceptions of Intelligence) in three different cultural contexts - Italy, Portugal and Romania. We hypothesized a bi-factor structure of the instrument constructed in Portugal by Faria (1990; 2006). Method: 617 subjects, 222 Italian, 200 Portuguese, and 195 Romanian students participated in the study, attending high school, equally distributed according to their gender and socioeconomic status. We administered the ECPI composed of 26 items, of which 15 static and 11 dynamic. Results: In the three cultural contexts the results revealed the existence of 7 items, one measuring the incremental and 6 the static theory, with low factor loadings - inferior to .30. These results convinced us to test a new model eliminating these 7 items. Therefore, even if the fit of the model improved, this could not be considered a satisfactory result. Conclusions: Future research could include more in depth analyses of linguistic properties of items which compose the static sub-scale, in order to find better operationalizations of the static personal conceptions of intelligence. © 2011 Associazione Oasi Maria SS