A Cross-cultural Study of Recovery for People with Psychiatric Disabilities Between U.S. and Japan

The concept of recovery has been expanding overseas with remarkable speed. The Recovery Assessment Scale (RAS) is one of the measures widely used to capture self-perceptions of a sense of recovery for people with psychiatric disabilities. The current study tested measurement invariance of RAS between the US and Japanese samples for people with psychiatric disabilities, which is a precursor of further cross-cultural comparisons without any contamination of systematic cultural bias. A multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis was applied to US (N = 446) and Japanese (N = 214) participants for testing configural, loading, and intercept invariance. The results revealed that RAS items equally captured their associated recovery domains between American and Japanese participants. For two domains, “personal confidence and hope” and “reliance on others,” the two groups systematically responded with different patterns. Different cultural environments may have additive influences toward people’s response patterns to their recovery across countries.