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Assessing the measurement invariance of the Brief Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale in Chinese and American adolescents

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Abstract

Purpose

This study evaluated the measurement invariance of the Brief Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale (BMSLSS) and latent means across early adolescents from two diverse cultural settings, China and America.

Methods

We sampled 2045 middle school students (960 males) from China and 1747 middle school students (887 males) from America. Confirmatory factor analysis and multi-group confirmatory factor analysis were performed to examine the factor structure and the measurement equivalence across the two cultures and then examined latent mean differences between Chinese early adolescents and American early adolescents.

Results

Results of confirmatory factor analyses provided support for the expected one-factor structure. And a series of multi-group confirmatory factor analyses supported full configural invariance, full metric invariance, and partial scalar invariance between the two groups. These findings suggest that the BMSLSS may provide acceptable comparisons and meaningful correlates across the two differing cultures. Subsequent analyses of latent means indicated the suitability of the BMSLSS for conducting mean comparisons and revealed significant differences between Chinese early adolescents and American early adolescents.

Conclusions

The BMSLSS appears to be suitable for cross-cultural studies between Chinese and American early adolescents. Chinese early adolescents reported lower life satisfaction than early American adolescents.

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Funding

This research was supported by MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Youth Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (Grant No. 15YJC190012), Hunan Provincial Social Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 16YBA199), General Project of Hunan Provincial Social Science Achievement Review Committee (Grant No. XSPYBZZO27), and General Project of 2016 Hunan Provincial Teaching Reform “The Empirical Study on College Students’ Scientific Literacy Cultivation under SRTP Model—Application of Major of Applied Psychology” awarded to Dr. Yu Ling.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Education, Hunan Agricultural University, Changsha, 410128, China

    Yifang Zeng, Yu Ling, Yushu He & Peng Fu

  2. Department of Psychology, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, 29208, USA

    E. Scott Huebner

Authors
  1. Yifang Zeng
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  2. Yu Ling
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  3. E. Scott Huebner
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  4. Yushu He
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  5. Peng Fu
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Correspondence to Yu Ling.

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The authors declare that they do not have conflicts of interest.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Educational College of Hunan Agricultural University Institutional Review Board, with the University of South Carolina Institutional Review Board, and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration as well as its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Zeng, Y., Ling, Y., Huebner, E.S. et al. Assessing the measurement invariance of the Brief Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale in Chinese and American adolescents. Qual Life Res 27, 259–266 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11136-017-1688-0

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