A Conference on Cross-cultural Research in Honor of Prof. Gordon Cheung

On 13 January 2016, a conference on Cross-cultural Research was jointly organised by the Center for International Business Studies and the Department of Management at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) Business School in honour of Prof. Gordon W. Cheung, former Associate Pro-Vice-Chancellor of CUHK and a professor at the Department of Management of CUHK Business School.At the conference, Prof. Cheung delivered a keynote address titled “Beyond Measurement Artifacts: Integrating Measurement Equivalence with Theory Development in Cross-Cultural Research” (please refer to the abstract for details). There was also a panel discussion with speakers including Ying-yi Hong, Choh-Ming Li Professor of Marketing at CUHK Business School, Jiing-Lih (Larry) FARH, Chair Professor and Director of Hang Lung Center for Organisational Research at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Michael Harris BOND, Visiting Chair Professor at the Department of Management & Marketing of Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

In the final remarks session, Prof. Michael Hui, Pro-Vice-Chancellor of CUHK and Prof. Gordon Cheung’s students Linda Wang from City University of Hong Kong and Rebecca Lau from Open University of Hong Kong shared with the attendees their experiences of working with Prof. Cheung as a colleague/administrator and students respectively.

The conference ended with a gift presentation to Prof. Cheung by the Dean Prof. Kalok Chan to acknowledge his dedication and long-term service to the School. Prof. Cheung left the School after having worked here for 22 years for a new endeavour in his career.

Prof. Cheung’s Biography

Prof. Gordon W. Cheung obtained his BBA from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) and his PhD in management from Virginia Tech. He started his academic career at CUHK in January 1994. Gordon is well recognised internationally as an expert in structural equation modelling, especially in measurement equivalence/invariance and estimation of moderating and mediating effects in complex latent variable models. He has published more than 20 articles in research methodologies, which have been cited over 6,000 times. He has twice received the Sage Best Paper Award from the Research Methods Division of the Academy of Management (2000 and 2009) and in 2008 the Best Published Paper Award in Organisational Research Methods. He served as the Division Chair of the Research Methods Division of the Academy of Management in 2006/07 and is currently a member of the Editorial Board of Organisational Research Methods, the International Scientific Advisory Panel for the Behavioral Sciences Institute (BSI) at Singapore Management University, and the International Advisory Board, Center for the Advancement of Research Methods and Analysis (CARMA) in USA.

Prof. Cheung is an enthusiastic teacher who enjoys teaching and interacting with students. He taught undergraduate level international business, management, organisational behaviour, and graduate level research methods and structural equation modelling courses. He received many teaching awards, including the Vice-Chancellor Exemplary Teacher Award (2000) and the Faculty of Business Administration Outstanding Teacher Award (2002/03) at CUHK.

Besides his research and teaching excellence, Prof. Cheung also possesses extensive experiences in university administration. He served as the Associate Dean (Undergraduate Studies) of the Faculty of Business Administration, the Dean of Students of the Shaw College, the Director of Academic Links and Associate Vice-President (Academic Links) while he was at CUHK. In 2012-14, he served as the President of Asia-Pacific Association for International Education, one of the most important associations in the world in promoting international higher education.

He has published more than 10 papers in measurement equivalence/invariance (ME/I), an research interest which he started more than 15 years ago. His paper “Testing Factorial Invariance Across Groups: A Reconceptualisation and Proposed New Method” published at Journal of Management in 1999 and the paper “Assessing Extreme and Acquiescence Response Sets in Cross-Cultural Research Using Structural Equations Modelling” published at Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology in 2000 have defined the way on how ME/I should be examined. The paper “Evaluating Goodness-of-Fit Indices for Testing Measurement Invariance” published in 2002 at Structural Equation Modelling Journal, defining the standard on how nested models should be compared, has received more than 3,000 citations. The paper “Testing Equivalence in the Structure, Means, and Variances of Higher-Order Constructs with Structural Equation Modelling” published in 2008 at Organisational Research Methods received the 2008 Best Paper Published in Organisational Research Methods Award. In 2012 he published the paper “A direct comparison approach for testing measurement invariance” at Organisational Research Methods, which introduced a revolutionary new method for estimating the magnitude of non-equivalence.

Abstract of Prof. Cheung’s Keynote Address at the Conference

Measurement equivalence/invariance (ME/I) is a general term that can be applied to the comparison of the various components of measurement models, and can sometimes be extended to structural models and mean structures. ME/I is most commonly considered as a condition that should be met before meaningful comparisons of survey results across groups can be made. In this presentation, Prof. Gordon Cheung is going to demonstrate that measurement (non-) equivalence is not necessarily measurement artifacts. He is going to explain how various tests of ME/I can be used to examine different phenomena in cross-cultural research and how to integrate these phenomena in the theory development process in cross-cultural research. Finally, he is going to demonstrate a newly developed method for testing ME/I that can be used to estimate the magnitude of cross-cultural differences in the ME/I context.