An examination of the measurement equivalence of the brief fear of negative evaluation scale across individuals who identify with an Asian ethnicity and individuals who identify with a European ethnicity

A body of research has demonstrated that individuals with Asian ethnicity endorse higher levels of fear of negative evaluation compared with individuals with European ethnicity. To date, no study has examined whether this Asian-European difference may be confounded by the differential interpretation of the measures of fear of negative evaluation by the two groups. The current study thus aimed to examine the measurement equivalence of the 12-item Brief Fear of Negative Evaluation (BFNE) scale and its 8-item variant composed of straightforwardly worded items (BFNE-S) in a sample of individuals who identified with a Chinese ethnicity (n = 204) and a sample of individuals who identified with an Anglo ethnicity (n = 528). Measurement equivalence across the samples was obtained for a two-factor BFNE model and a one-factor BFNE-S model. However, the BFNE-S model demonstrated superior fit to the data. Using the BFNE-S, we found that the Chinese ethnicity sample scored significantly higher on the latent dimension of fear of negative evaluation compared with the Anglo ethnicity sample (d = 0.24). These findings disambiguate previous research on Asian-European differences in fear of negative evaluation and highlight the need for the continued examination of the validity of measures across different ethnicities and cultures.