A cross-cultural study of the need for cognitive closure scale: Comparing its structure in Croatia, Italy, USA and the Netherlands

This study was designed to compare the factor structure of Need for Closure Scale (NFCS) as it emerges from three European samples (Croatia, Italy and The Netherlands) to the structure emerging from a USA sample, and to test the invariance of the structure of the scale both across three European contexts and across European and US samples. This comparison was conducted to examine the generalizability of results obtained with the NFCS across cultures.

The sample sizes employed in this study range from 201 (Croatia) to 418 (Italy) participants. First- and second-order confirmatory factor analysis and multiple-group measurement invariance tests were performed using the LISREL-8 program (Joreskog and Sorbom, 1993). The analyses revealed that the factor structure of the scale was invariant across all samples, and that the best fitting model was one with two latent second-order factors, thus confirming results of previous studies (Kruglanski et al., 1997 Neuberg, Judice, West, 1997).