The HEXACO Personality Inventory-Revised (HEXACO-PI-R) has become one of the most heavily applied measurement tools for the assessment of basic personality traits. Correspondingly, the inventory has been translated to many languages for use in cross-cultural research. However, formal tests examining whether the different language versions of the HEXACO-PI-R provide equivalent measures of the 6 personality dimensions are missing. We provide a large-scale test of measurement invariance of the 100-item version of the HEXACO-PI-R across 16 languages spoken in European and Asian countries (N = 30,484). Multigroup exploratory structural equation modeling and confirmatory factor analyses revealed consistent support for configural and metric invariance, thus implying that the factor structure of the HEXACO dimensions as well as the meaning of the latent HEXACO factors is comparable across languages. However, analyses did not show overall support for scalar invariance; that is, equivalence of facet intercepts. A complementary alignment analysis supported this pattern, but also revealed substantial heterogeneity in the level of (non)invariance across facets and factors. Overall, results imply that the HEXACO-PI-R provides largely comparable measurement of the HEXACO dimensions, although the lack of scalar invariance highlights the necessity for future research clarifying the interpretation of mean-level trait differences across countries.

Ajou University Suwon South Korea

Chiba University Inage Ku Chiba Japan

Deparment of Psychology Sapienza University of Rome Rome Italy

Department of Business Administration University of Rostock Rostock Germany

Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Department of Educational Science University of Twente The Netherlands

Department of Personality Evaluation and Psychological Treatments Universidad de Valencia Valencia Spain

Department of Psychology Brock University St Catharines Ontario Canada

Department of Psychology Faculty of Philosophy University of Novi Sad Novi Sad Serbia

Department of Psychology National Chung Cheng University Chiayi County Taiwan

Department of Psychology University of Calgary Alberta Canada

Department of Psychology University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli Caserta Italy

Department of Psychology University of Koblenz Landau Landau Germany

Department of Psychology Uppsala University Uppsala Sweden

Department of Social and Developmental Psychology Sapienza University of Rome Rome Italy

Department of Work and Organisational Psychology University of Hagen Hagen Germany

Eötvös Loránd University Budapest Hungary

Fatih Sultan Mehmet University Istanbul Turkey

Harvard University

Independent Practice Berlin Germany

Institute of Criminological and Sociological Research Belgrad Serbia

Institute of Psychology Department of General and Health Psychology Kazimierz Wielki University Bydgoszcz Poland

Institute of Psychology Polish Academy of Sciences Warsaw Poland

Ivo Pilar Institute of Social Sciences Zagreb Croatia

Lomonosov Moscow State University Moscow Russia

Palacky University Olomouc Olomouc Czech Republic

Sabanci University Istanbul Turkey

University of Copenhagen Copenhagen Denmark

University of Milan Bicocca Milan Italy

University of Santiago de Compostela Santiago de Compostela Spain

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