The present study, including 83 Brazilian and 51 Dutch children, evaluated the presence of cultural bias in items of the SON-R 5½-17 that make use of concrete objects and situations. Two procedures were followed to detect item bias. The first consisted of asking the children, immediately after an incorrect answer, whether they recognized the pictures. The second procedure compared item difficulties of the Brazilian children with those of the Dutch children belonging to the standardization sample of the SON-R 5½-17. Fourteen items were detected with bias: ten of these favored the Dutch group and four the Brazilian group. The cultural disadvantage for Brazilian children is rather small, taking the large amount of investigated items into account. This study indicated which items of the SON-R 5½-17 should be improved, not only for reasons of cultural bias, but also because children, irrespective of their cultural background, encountered problems with the recognition of several pictures.
cultural bias; item bias; nonverbal intelligence test
