Abstract
The principle of invariance is a mandatory methodological requirement for the psychological measures, even when items such as self-concept measures frequently present asymmetric heavy-tailed distributions. Few validated self-concept instruments can be applied in Eastern–Western cross-cultural studies. The Five-Factor Self-Concept Questionnaire (AF5) is one of the few psychometrically sound instruments used to assess multidimensional self-concept in Spanish-speaking samples. The availability of the AF5 in Spanish and Chinese would facilitate cross-cultural research. To validate the Chinese version of the AF5, we used multisample confirmatory factor analysis with transformed dichotomous scales from the median to compare four alternative theoretical models. The sample consisted of 2507 participants (52.3% women) from China (n = 1298) and Spain (n = 1209), ranging in age from 19 to 35. Analyses confirmed the five-factor structure of the Chinese AF5 (i.e., academic, social, emotional, family, and physical) compared to the Spanish sample. Moreover, the Chinese version of the AF5 was found to be invariant in terms of item-factor weights, factor variance, and between-factor covariance, compared to the original Spanish version. The findings from this first validation study indicate that the Chinese version of the AF5 is an acceptable measure for use with Chinese-speaking adolescents and young adults.
Highlights
IntroductionSelf-concept is usually conceptualized as an individual’s self-perception formed by experiences with significant others, attributions for one’s own behavior, and environmental reinforcements.The adequate perception, organization, and integration of the experiences that differentiate human beings have been positively related to adequate behavioral, cognitive, affective, and social functioning [1,2,3]
Self-concept is usually conceptualized as an individual’s self-perception formed by experiences with significant others, attributions for one’s own behavior, and environmental reinforcements.The adequate perception, organization, and integration of the experiences that differentiate human beings have been positively related to adequate behavioral, cognitive, affective, and social functioning [1,2,3]
The highest correlation value was found between family self-concept and parental acceptance/involvement (r = 0.63, r2 = 0.40), and only family self-concept was negatively related to the strictness/imposition dimension (robust r2 intervals (0.07–0.04) did not include the zero value) [16,76,77,78,79]
Summary
Self-concept is usually conceptualized as an individual’s self-perception formed by experiences with significant others, attributions for one’s own behavior, and environmental reinforcements.The adequate perception, organization, and integration of the experiences that differentiate human beings have been positively related to adequate behavioral, cognitive, affective, and social functioning [1,2,3]. Response distributions are usually unimodal, they present at least two widely recognized technical problems: (1) it is difficult to differentiate the responses that are not in the tail of the distribution [7,8,9] and (2) wide tails are challenging in that they cause the statistical error to increase more seriously when researchers apply parametric statistics [10,11,12,13,14] This behavioral pattern observed in psychological science does not seem clearly correlated with behavioral instability newly studied in Symmetry [15] but has caused serious problems in confirming invariance [8,9,12], among other well-known problems [11,16,17]. We transformed the original response scale, from 1 to 99, to a new scale that is dichotomized by median, which resolves the problem with the skewness of the original distributions [18,19]
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