Adaptation and validation of bogus items scale: A Chinese version

Abstract Over the past decade, there has been a growing interest in detecting insufficient effort responding (IER), which poses a threat to the validity of conclusions drawn from questionnaire surveys and can even impact their reproducibility. One of the prominent indexes used to detect IER is the bogus item (BI). However, empirical evidence regarding the validity of BI scales in languages other than English remains limited. The present research aims to address this gap by adapting the original English version of BI scales into a Chinese version and establishing effective cut scores. In Study 1, we tested the specificity of the BI which was literally translated into Chinese. In Study 2, we identified the characteristics of the BI with low quality through interviews and then adapted them. Finally, Study 3 was conducted to explore the psychometric properties of the Chinese BI scale and determine the cut scores by three methods, namely, extreme grouping, correlation curve, and binomial distribution. Rather than merely introducing a specific language version of BI scales, we delved into the rationale behind using the BI to detect IER and provided a comprehensive methodology for adapting the BI scale into multiple languages beyond Chinese. Thus, the present research contributes to a more generalizable framework for BI scale adaptation.