The Dispositional Insight Test: Structure and Validity Across Cultures

The Dispositional Insight Test (DIT) is designed to assess a person's knowledge representations of personality and behavior expressions in different situational contexts. Despite its usefulness for professionals who regularly assess people, the factor structure of the DIT and measurement properties in different national populations have yet to be tested. Here, we report on the dimensionality and cross-cultural equivalence of the full and short Dispositional Insight Test (DIT and DIT-S), a novel measure of an important but understudied concept. Participants were students and their acquaintances in three countries from distinct world regions (n  = 817 in the Netherlands, 434 in New Zealand, and 437 in South Africa), who completed the test online. Multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis for categorical outcomes supported a higher order dimensional structure comprising three factors: trait induction, trait extrapolation, and trait contextualization. Invariance testing showed this structure to be equivalent across the three cultural groups. The DIT exhibited expected correlations with cognitive ability. Future cross-cultural research on the DIT and its correlates is invited.