Factor structure and factorial invariance of the strengths and difficulties questionnaire among children of prisoners and their parents

Parental imprisonment has been linked to a variety of adverse psychological outcomes for children and adolescents. The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) has been widely used to assess behavioural and emotional difficulties among 7-17 year olds in the general population and more recently has been utilised among samples of children of prisoners. Previous research has variously tested traditional one-, three- and five- factor solutions to the SDQ, and more recently one bifactor solution has been examined. Based on a sample of children of prisoners (N = 724) and their non-imprisoned parent or caregiver (N = 658), the aim of the present study was to simultaneously compare nine alternative factor structures, including previously tested models and alternative bifactor solutions. Tests of factorial invariance and composite reliability were also performed. The five-factor model was found to provide the best fit for the data. Tests of factorial invariance revealed that the five-factor model provided an equally acceptable, but not identical fit, among boys and girls. Composite reliability scores were low for the Conduct Problems and Peer Problems subscales. The utility of the SDQ in measuring psychological functioning in response to parental imprisonment is discussed

Patient reports of health outcome for adults living with sickle cell disease: development and testing of the ASCQ-Me item banks

BACKGROUND: Providers and patients have called for improved understanding of the health care requirements of adults with sickle cell disease (SCD) and have identified the need for a systematic, reliable and valid method to document the patient-reported outcomes (PRO) of adult SCD care. To address this need, the Adult Sickle Cell Quality of Life Measurement System (ASCQ-Me) was designed to complement the Patient Reported Outcome Measurement Information System (PROMIS®). Here we describe methods and results of the psychometric evaluation of ASCQ-Me item banks (IBs). METHODS: At seven geographically-disbursed clinics within the US, 556 patients responded to questions generated to assess cognitive, emotional, physical and social impacts of SCD. We evaluated the construct validity of the hypothesized domains using exploratory factor analysis (EFA), parallel analysis (PA), and bi-factor analysis (Item Response Theory Graded Response Model, IRT-GRM). We used IRT-GRM and the Wald method to identify bias in responses across gender and age. We used IRT and Cronbach’s alpha coefficient to evaluate the reliability of the IBs and then tested the ability of summary scores based on IRT calibrations to discriminate among tertiles of respondents defined by SCD severity. RESULTS: Of the original 140 questions tested, we eliminated 48 that either did not form clean factors or provided biased measurement across subgroups defined by age and gender. Via EFA and PA, we identified three subfactors within physical impact: sleep, pain and stiffness impacts. Analysis of the resulting six item sets (sleep, pain, stiffness, cognitive, emotional and social impacts of SCD) supported their essential unidimensionality. With the exception of the cognitive impact IB, these item sets also were highly reliable across a broad range of values and highly significantly related to SCD disease severity. CONCLUSION: ASCQ-Me pain, sleep, stiffness, emotional and social SCD impact IBs demonstrated exceptional measurement properties using modern and classical psychometric methods of evaluation. Further development of the cognitive impact IB is required to improve its sensitivity to differences in SCD disease severity. Future research will evaluate the sensitivity of the ASCQ-Me IBs to change in SCD disease severity over time due to health interventions

Measuring Attitudes About Intimate Partner Violence Against Women: The ATT-IPV Scale

In lower-income settings, women more often than men justify intimate partner violence (IPV). Yet, the role of measurement invariance across gender is unstudied. We developed the ATT-IPV scale to measure attitudes about physical violence against wives in 1,055 married men and women ages 18-50 in My Hao district, Vietnam. Across 10 items about transgressions of the wife, women more often than men agreed that a man had good reason to hit his wife (3 % to 92 %; 0 % to 67 %). In random split-half samples, one-factor exploratory factor analysis (EFA) (N 1 = 527) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) (N 2 = 528) models for nine items with sufficient variability had significant loadings (0.575-0.883; 0.502-0.897) and good fit (RMSEA = 0.068, 0.048; CFI = 0.951, 0.978, TLI = 0.935, 0.970). Three items had significant uniform differential item functioning (DIF) by gender, and adjustment for DIF revealed that measurement noninvariance was partially masking men’s lower propensity than women to justify IPV. A CFA model for the six items without DIF had excellent fit (RMSEA = 0.019, CFI = 0.994, TLI = 0.991) and an attitudinal gender gap similar to the DIF-adjusted nine-item model, suggesting that the six-item scale reliably measures attitudes about IPV across gender. Researchers should validate the scale in urban Vietnam and elsewhere and decompose DIF-adjusted gender attitudinal gaps