The Scale of Personal Conceptions of Intelligence: A comparison of the Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian versions

Background: The aim of this research project was to conduct studies ofconfirmatory factor analyses of ECPI (Scale of Personal Conceptions ofIntelligence) in three different cultural contexts – Italy, Portugal and Ro-mania. We hypothesized a bi-factor structure of the instrument constructedin Portugal by Faria (1990; 2006). Method: 617 subjects, 222 Italian, 200Portuguese, 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, ofwhich 15 static and 11 dynamic. Results: In the three cultural contexts theresults revealed the existence of 7 items, one measuring the incrementaland 6 the static theory, with low factor loadings – inferior to .30. Theseresults 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 depthanalyses of linguistic properties of items which compose the static sub-scale,in order to find better operationalizations of the static personal conceptionsof intelligence.