Measurement Invariance of the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents in Chinese and American Adolescents Samples

Abstract

To establish the factor structure of the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (ERQ-CA) in Chinese and American adolescent samples; to assess measurement invariance of the ERQ-CA in Chinese and American adolescent samples and latent means across early adolescents from two diverse cultural settings. The ERQ-CA was administered to 1221 Chinese adolescents (49.3% males) and 1148 American adolescents (50.1% males), and multi-group confirmatory factor analysis was performed to evaluate measurement invariance.(1) Multi-group confirmatory factor analysis of the ERQ-CA demonstrated full configural invariance, full metric invariance, partial scalar invariance, and partial strict invariance. (2) The latent variable mean comparisons revealed significant differences between the two samples; specifically, Chinese adolescents’ mean scores on the latent variables of cognitive reappraisal (CR) and expressive suppression (ES) were significantly higher than American adolescents’ scores. The findings demonstrated that the ERQ-CA displays appropriate measurement invariance across Chinese and America adolescents and that Chinese adolescents reported higher scores on CR and ES.