Appendix:

Short Form Cultural Intelligence Assessment

This measure is the result of ten years of academic research on cultural intelligence funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. It was developed in response to the need for an easy-to-administer assessment of individual differences in cultural intelligence. The research project that led to its development was headed by the first author of this book and involved dozens of university researchers around the world.

SFCQ

Below are ten statements about one’s experience when interacting with people from other cultures. Please indicate to what extent each of the following statements describes you.

USING THE SFCQ

Your score is the average value for the ten items.

In a sample of more than 3500 individuals from around the world, the average score was 3.51 with a standard deviation of .63.

If you answer the questions honestly, the SFCQ is a good indicator of your present level of CQ.

IMPORTANT FINDINGS REGARDING THE SFCQ

The SFCQ scale has been shown to be equivalent across cultures and has been administered in English, French, Indonesian, Turkish, and traditional Chinese. We know it measures CQ effectively in different languages and cultures.

The SFCQ is related to, but distinct from, emotional intelligence and personality. While some individual characteristics might lead to the development of CQ, we know that it is a unique element of an individual’s makeup.

The SFCQ is positively related to the number of languages individuals speak and their international experience (the number of countries they have lived in and the number of countries they have visited), and it is negatively related to their degree of ethnocentrism. This confirms that CQ is developed through experience.

The SFCQ predicts overall effectiveness in cross-cultural situations and job performance in a culturally diverse environment. It also predicts an individual’s ability to develop long-term relationships with culturally different people (e.g., if s/he has a good friend or a best friend from another culture). The SFCQ also predicts the ability of individuals to correctly assess the causes of behavior displayed by those of different cultures. In summary and as expected, CQ indicates the ability that individuals have to be effective in dealing with those from a different culture and in culturally challenging situations.

Because the SFCQ is a self-report measure, individuals can give answers that they think are desirable instead of being honest with themselves about their answers. In these cases their results are less valid. For this reason we recommend that this measure be used as only one indicator of an individual’s level of cultural intelligence.

A complete report of the development and validation of the SFCQ can be found in Thomas et al. (2015).