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The Factor Structure of Effortful Control and Measurement Invariance Across Ethnicity and Sex in a High-Risk Sample

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Abstract

Measurement invariance of a one-factor model of effortful control (EC) was tested for 853 low-income preschoolers (M age = 4.48 years). Using a teacher-report questionnaire and seven behavioral measures, configural invariance (same factor structure across groups), metric invariance (same pattern of factor loadings across groups), and partial scalar invariance (mostly the same intercepts across groups) were established across ethnicity (European Americans, African Americans and Hispanics) and across sex. These results suggest that the latent construct of EC behaved in a similar way across ethnic groups and sex, and that comparisons of mean levels of EC are valid across sex and probably valid across ethnicity, especially when larger numbers of tasks are used. The findings also support the use of diverse behavioral measures as indicators of a single latent EC construct.

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Notes

  1. Garon et al. (2008) distinguished between simple and complex inhibition, and the two-factor EFAs suggested that the three delay/persistence tasks (gift wrap, waiting for bow, and yarn tangle) primarily loaded on one factor, whereas the other tasks loaded on a second factor, providing some support for this distinction in our data despite the small second eigenvalues. In CFAs, the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC; Raftery 1995) did not clearly favor one model over the other, and the correlations among the factors in the two-factor model were estimated to be .75 or above in each group. Moreover, when two factors were tested in each of the ethnic groups, the model would not converge for the Hispanic group. Therefore, we used the one-factor model to maintain parsimony.

  2. The Kaiser criterion, which states that one should retain factors with eigenvalues greater than 1.0, was not used because it tends to overestimate the true number of factors (Lance et al. 2006; Zwick and Velicer 1982). In addition, the Kaiser criterion should only be used for principal components analysis, not factor analysis (Fabrigar et al. 1999).

  3. Measurement invariance models in which the Hispanic group consisted of only of English speaking students or only Spanish-speaking students were compared to the models that included the entire sample. In these alternate models, metric, configural, and partial scalar invariance were established in both language groups. In the full sample, 5 intercepts needed to be released for partial scalar invariance. In the English speaking group, 4 needed to be released and all were the same as in the full sample. In the Spanish-speaking group, 5 needed to be released: 3 were the same as the full sample, and two were different. This finding suggests that language differences cannot fully explain the differences in intercepts among the ethnic groups in our sample.

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Correspondence to Michael J. Sulik.

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This research was supported by a grant to the Nancy Eisenberg (PI), Tracy Spinrad, and Carlos Valiente and to the School Readiness Consortium from the National Institute of Child Health and Development.

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Sulik, M.J., Huerta, S., Zerr, A.A. et al. The Factor Structure of Effortful Control and Measurement Invariance Across Ethnicity and Sex in a High-Risk Sample. J Psychopathol Behav Assess 32, 8–22 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10862-009-9164-y

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