Equivalence in International Business Research: A Three-Step Approach

A primary research area within the field of international business (IB) is to establish the extent to which concepts, theories, and findings identified in one country are applicable to other contexts and which are unique and cannot be found in other contexts. Researchers in IB acknowledge the importance of the context in their studies, but the practice of assessing equivalence (or invariance) is not widely diffused within the community. We first discuss the components of equivalence (construct, method, and item equivalence), and we offer a three-step approach to address equivalence in the writing and revision of a paper. We aim to help editors, reviewers, and researchers produce more reliable research and navigate the tension between generalizable relationships and context-specific ones, both theoretically and empirically, before performing analysis and hypothesis testing. We then apply equivalence to the construct of firm economic performance as a case study, but the same logic can be applied to other constructs as well.