Indigenous Measures of Personality Assessment in Asian Countries: A Review Fanny M. Cheung and Shu Fai Cheung The Chinese University of Hong Kong Sayuri Wada Saitama, Japan Jianxin Zhang Chinese Academy of Science This article reviews attempts to develop multidimensional personality measures in Asia and their applications in clinical assessment. Indigenous personality assessment measures in India, Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan are examined. These early attempts have not yielded a comprehensive personality measure that integrates a theoretical framework and an empirical program of validation. The Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory (CPAI) is cited as an example to illustrate the process of developing an indigenous measure that meets the testing standards of established assessment instruments. On the basis of the research findings from the CPAI, the authors discuss the relevance of indigenous measures in clinical assessment in native cultures as well as in informing mainstream personality assessment. Although the importation of well-established Western person- ality tests provides Asian psychologists with a wealth of evidence to support their applications, the indigenization movement in Asian psychology has raised a number of concerns about the “transport and test” function of test importation since the 1970s. The coming of age in Asian psychology has led to the examination of the cultural relevance of Western theories and tools. Notwith- standing the conscientious efforts made in the adaptation of major Western instruments in recent years, challenges have been raised on both ideological and practical grounds. Sue (1983) criticized the predominance of the etic approach in psychology at the expense of the emic approach. The etic approach emphasizes “core similari- ties” in all human beings, whereas the emic approach “utilizes a culture-specific orientation” (p. 584) relevant to the local context. In particular, importation of Western theories and measures rep- resents the imposed etic approach in which Western constructs are assumed to be universally applicable and are “imposed” on the local culture. Ideologically, this approach is considered a form of cultural imperialism undermining national identity and conscious- ness. The use of imposed etic measures would “cut the social– perceptual world” according to Western theories (Yik & Bond, 1993, p. 92), coax the observed patterns of behavior to the imposed model, and ignore the cultural meaning of the local conceptual- ization of the patterns of behavior. In practice, a major deficiency of the imposed etic approach lies in the omission of important culture-specific or emic personality constructs in the imported instruments (Cheung et al., 2001). Such personality constructs could have provided a fuller understanding of behavior in local cultural contexts. Ho (1998) defined an indigenous psychology as “the study of human behavior and mental processes within a cultural context” in which cultural “conceptions and methodologies rooted in that cultural group [are] employed to generate knowledge” (p. 94). These study were conducted from an indigenous perspective in- stead of an imported one. The most active movements of indige- nous psychology are found in India, the Philippines, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. Psychologists from these locations have identified unique personality constructs relevant to their cultural experiences that have been ignored in imported psychological theories. Kim and Berry (1993) identified a key aspect of indigenous psycholo- gies as the emphasis on contextualized understanding rooted in a particular setting and the discovery and use of natural taxonomies. Many of the indigenous personality constructs reflect the relational nature of human experience, which defines selfhood in a social and interpersonal context (Ho, Peng, Lai, & Chan, 2001). Examples include the Chinese concepts of harmony and face (Cheung et al., 2001; Gabrenya & Hwang, 1996); the Japanese concept of amae (sweet indulgence); the Korean concept of chong (affection; Kim, Park, & Park, 1999); and the concept of selflessness, or “selfless self” in Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism (Ho et al., 2001; Verma, 1997). In the field of psychotherapy, indigenous Japanese ways of thinking and behaving have raised Western interest in forms of “quiet therapies” (Reynolds, 1980) such as Morita and Naikan therapies. Fanny M. Cheung and Shu Fai Cheung, Department of Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong; Sayuri Wada, Saitama, Japan; Jianxin Zhang, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing, China. This project was partially supported by the Hong Kong Government Research Grants Council, Earmarked Grant Projects CUHK4326/01H and CUHK4333/00H and by Direct Grant 2020662 from The Chinese Univer- sity of Hong Kong. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Fanny M. Cheung, Department of Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong. E-mail: fmcheung@cuhk.edu.hk Psychological Assessment Copyright 2003 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 2003, Vol. 15, No. 3, 280 –289 1040-3590/03/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/1040-3590.15.3.280 280