This presentation discusses a methodological solution to a main challenge quantitative research has to meet: namely the construction of measurement equivalence (e.g. Brown, 2015). Within comparative educational research, the issue of a research instrument’s comparability between different cultural and national contexts is part of an ongoing controversial debate that focusses on questions of culturalism as well as methodological nationalism, statism and educationism (Dale & Robertson, 2009; Parreira do Amaral, 2015). These issues become especially pressing when it comes to quantitative methods (Blömeke, 2011) that aim to compare what could be seen as uncomparable: how, for example, could a quantitative instrument guarantee that the answer of an American teacher on the question whether she/he likes to work with children and adolescents is comparable to that of a Swedish teacher? How can a quantitative instrument test whether “working with children” is a comparable construct across the examined countries? Diverging research traditions, conceptualizations and phenomenological traditions lead to questions regarding the compatibility of quantitative instruments on several levels. They range from issues regarding single items (e.g. translational issues, Alm, Jungert & Thornberg, 2014) over issues regarding scales (e.g. diverging conceptualizations leading to diverging operationalizations of seemingly similar constructs in different contexts, Berry, Poortinga, Segall & Dasen, 2002) to issues regarding the whole instrument (e.g. country-specific missing or nonexistent conceptualizations, Byrne & Watkins, 2016). Next to cultural biases, several forms of methodical biases in cross-cultural comparisons are discussed (Brown, 2015). Thus, a comparison can only be done after the comparability of the concepts it is based on is established. As conclusion of this symposium, this presentation demonstrates a validation approach for scales obtained from confirmatory factor analysis across countries. Measurement invariance analyses provide information on whether cross-country differences result from differences among the latent factors or from a different understanding of the quantitative instrument applied (Brown, 2015). Thus, this methodological approach helps to ensure the validity of quantitative transnational research by incorporating the demand for comparability into the instrument itself. The presentation discusses to which extent (and with which limitations) this approach enables researchers to rule out several sources of error regarding individual items, scales and the whole instrument. The measurement invariance backed results show how country-specific differences among future teachers’ career choice motives can be linked to different political and social framework conditions, including the appreciation of altruistic motives, working conditions or the universities’ content structure of their teacher training programs.

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