ERIC Digest No. 210. The concept of culture looms large in the world these days. Their appearance, behavior, and customs are different, and sometimes vastly different. Multicultural perspectives challenge traditional perspectives on assessment by advancing an additional source of variation in test responses that is presumed to escape test developers and test users. They used these terms to address the specificity and generality of personality and career assessments with respect to culture.
Linguistic equivalence refers to the language and thus to the instructions and items of assessments.
Conceptual equivalence refers to the meaning of the constructs that are assessed. Finally, normative equivalence refers to the existence of interpretive assistance for the interpreter of an assessment. They range from misdiagnosis to labeling to inappropriate treatment planning to erroneous conclusions about intervention effectiveness. The quandary of the subtitle of this digest arises, as Janet Helms puts it in a 1997 chapter about ability assessment, because cultural equivalence is not considered or is considered to be unimportant. However, counselors are confronted with increasingly diverse individuals across colors and cultures.