Measurement equivalence of neighborhood quality measures for European American and Mexican American families

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The factorial and construct equivalence of subscales assessing parents' and children's perceptions of the quality of their neighborhood was examined in Mexican American and European American families. All subscales (dangerous people in the neighborhood, sense of safety in the neighborhood, quality of the physical environment) demonstrated adequate partial factorial invariance across English- and Spanish-speaking Mexican American and European American families. Reports by children about dangerous people in the neighborhood was the closest to achieving strict factorial invariance, and the only one of the four dimensions to achieve invariance in the validity analyses across Mexican American and European American families. The implications of using these self-report neighborhood quality measures in studies of multiple cultural or language groups are discussed.