The Intercultural Conflict Style Inventory® or ICS® is a widely-used assessment of intercultural communication and conflict resolution. The ICS Inventory has been rigorously tested, using psychometric criteria, and found to possess high cross-cultural validity and reliability.

The validation work of the ICS Inventory indicates that the ICS Inventory is a cross-culturally generalizable (i.e., international and domestic diverse culture groups), valid and reliable measure of intercultural communication and conflict style that does not contain cultural bias.

The following publications provide additional information on validation research of the ICS Inventory:

• Hammer, M.R. (2009). Solving problems and resolving conflict using the Intercultural Conflict Style model and inventory. In M.A. Moodian (Editor). Contemporary Leadership and Intercultural Competence (chapter 17, pp. 219-232). Los Angeles, CA: Sage

• Hammer, M.R. (2005). The Intercultural Conflict Style Inventory: A conceptual framework and measure of intercultural conflict approaches. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 29, 675-695.

The chart below summarizes some of the main validation findings of the ICS Inventory:

Instrument Development Criteria	ICS Inventory Fully Meets Criteria
ICS model is culturally inclusive and does not contain cultural bias—Theoretical framework developed from extensive inclusion of western/individualistic cultural perspectives and non-western, collectivistic cultural perspectives.
ICS Inventory items reflect perspectives of people from a wide range of international and domestic cultural groups—items are drawn from a rich array of culturally diverse research studies.
ICS Inventory has strong “content” validity—intercultural “panel of experts” methodology used to evaluate meaning of items vis-à-vis their direct/indirect or emotionally expressive/restrained focus.
IDI validity results confirmed in two large, multicultural samples of culturally diverse respondents—using rigorous Confirmatory Factor Analysis in item/scale analysis that resulted in a “good fit” of the items to the direct/indirect and emotionally expressive/restrained scales.
The ICS Inventory is reliable across culture groups—Coefficient alphas were .73 for the direct/indirect scale and .85 for the emotionally expressive/restrained scale across multicultural sample respondents.
ICS Inventory is generalizable, equally valid and applicable across gender, education and amount of time living in other cultural communities—no significant differences in ICS Inventory scores found.