Abstract

We propose a new method, the Monte Carlo confidence interval (MCCI) method, for studying measurement invariance. This method allows researchers to examine the invariance of all items simultaneously by comparing the observed between-group differences in parameters with those obtained under the null hypothesis of invariance. We compare the performance of our method to two other methods: the multigroup confirmatory factor analysis (MG-CFA) and the forward method using confidence intervals (forward CI). The results show that our method performed better than the MG-CFA method and comparably with the forward CI method. The code to implement our method and an empirical example are provided in the Supplementary materials.

摘要

我们提出了一种新的方法，即蒙特卡洛置信区间 (MCCI) 方法，用于研究测量不变性。该方法允许研究人员通过比较观察到的组间参数差异与在不变性零假设下获得的参数来同时检查所有项目的不变性。我们将我们方法的性能与其他两种方法进行了比较：多组验证性因素分析 (MG-CFA) 和使用置信区间的正向方法 (正向 CI)。结果表明，我们的方法比 MG-CFA 方法表现更好，与前向 CI 方法相当。补充材料中提供了实现我们方法的代码和一个经验示例。