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 Ro- mania. 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, atten- ding high school, equally distributed according to their gender and so- cioeconomic 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. There- fore, even if the fit of the model improved, this could not be considered a sa- tisfactory 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.