Factorial invariance of the Brief Cope across poverty level
Carr A, Caskie GI, Evans MK, Zonderman AB. Factorial invariance of the Brief Cope across poverty level. Paper presented at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Gerontological Society of America; Oct; Atlanta, GA. Gerontologist. 2009;49(suppl):406.
The Brief COPE (Carver, 1997), derived from the original COPE Inventory (Carver et al., 1989), is a widely used measure of coping skills in the aging literature. A review of the literature reveals that the Brief COPE is utilized with individuals from a broad socioeconomic range (e.g., Stein et al., 2008). As such, the present study investigated the fac- torial invariance (FI) of the Brief COPE for individuals above (n=956) and below (n=883) the poverty level, using the factor structure found in a previous exploratory factor analysis (Carr et al., 2008). Participants included 1839 community-dwelling African American (n=1104) and White (n=735) adults aged 30–64 years (M=47.96, SD=9.135) from the National Institute on Aging’s Healthy Aging in Neighborhoods of Diver- sity across the Life Span study. The evaluation of factorial invariance involved testing a nested sequence of increasingly stringent models (Meredith, 1993). A comparison of the configural invariance model to the weak invariance model was non-significant, Δ χ(9, N=1839)=11.318, p=.25, indicating that factor loadings for the Brief COPE were equal across poverty level. However, the comparison of the weak and strong invariance models was significant, indicating inequality of observed means across poverty level. The relative fit indices for the weak facto- rial invariance model indicated an adequate fit to the data (e.g., RMSEA=.062). The identification of weak factorial invariance in this study allows valid comparison of factors scores in the Brief COPE to be made (Liang, 2002) when comparing individuals below and above the poverty level.
Carr A, Caskie GI, Evans MK, Zonderman AB. Factorial invariance of the Brief Cope across poverty level. Paper presented at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Gerontological Society of America; Oct; Atlanta, GA. Gerontologist. 2009;49(suppl):406.
The Brief COPE (Carver, 1997), derived from the original COPE Inventory (Carver et al., 1989), is a widely used measure of coping skills in the aging literature. A review of the literature reveals that the Brief COPE is utilized with individuals from a broad socioeconomic range (e.g., Stein et al., 2008). As such, the present study investigated the fac- torial invariance (FI) of the Brief COPE for individuals above (n=956) and below (n=883) the poverty level, using the factor structure found in a previous exploratory factor analysis (Carr et al., 2008). Participants included 1839 community-dwelling African American (n=1104) and White (n=735) adults aged 30–64 years (M=47.96, SD=9.135) from the National Institute on Aging’s Healthy Aging in Neighborhoods of Diver- sity across the Life Span study. The evaluation of factorial invariance involved testing a nested sequence of increasingly stringent models (Meredith, 1993). A comparison of the configural invariance model to the weak invariance model was non-significant, Δ χ(9, N=1839)=11.318, p=.25, indicating that factor loadings for the Brief COPE were equal across poverty level. However, the comparison of the weak and strong invariance models was significant, indicating inequality of observed means across poverty level. The relative fit indices for the weak facto- rial invariance model indicated an adequate fit to the data (e.g., RMSEA=.062). The identification of weak factorial invariance in this study allows valid comparison of factors scores in the Brief COPE to be made (Liang, 2002) when comparing individuals below and above the poverty level.
