Is the Aggression Questionnaire bias free? A Rasch analysis

Buss and Perry (1992) developed the Aggression Questionnaire (AQ) to assess aggressiveness as a personality trait in high school and college samples. The AQ has been used by researchers in United States, Italy, Germany, Netherland, Japan, Canada, and Greece. The present study is reported on an Arabic adapted version of the AQ among a sample of 510 Egyptian high school students. An exploratory factor analysis technique defined four factors: physical aggression (9 items), verbal aggression (5 items), anger (7 items), and hostility (8 items). The correlation among the four factors ranged from 0.38 to 0.49. A confirmatory factor analysis revealed that the AQ could be described by four first levels factors that were linked by a higher order factor of general aggression. Rasch analysis showed that the AQ was bias free. Relevance of these findings to the assessment of the trait aggressiveness is discussed.