Measurement Invariance and Response Bias: A Stochastic Frontier Approach

Robert Rosenman, Vidhura Tennekoon and Laura Hill ()
Additional contact information
Laura Hill: School of Economic Sciences, Washington State University

No 2010-10, Working Papers from School of Economic Sciences, Washington State University

Abstract: The goals of the present paper were to assess measurement invariance using a common econometric method and to illustrate the approach with self-reported measures of parenting behaviors before and after a family intervention. Most recent literature on measurement invariance (MI) in psychological research 1) explores the use of structural equation modeling (SEM) and confirmatory factor analysis to identify measurement invariance, and 2) tests for measurement invariance across groups rather than across time. We use method, Stochastic Frontier Estimation, or SFE, to identify response bias and covariates of response bias both across individuals at a single point in time and across two measurement occasions (before and after participation in a family intervention). We examined the effects of participant demographics (N = 1437) on response bias; gender and race/ethnicity were related to magnitude of bias and to changes in bias across time, and bias was lower at posttest than at pretest. We discuss analytic advantages and disadvantages of SFE relative to SEM approaches and note that the technique may be particularly useful in addressing the problem of “response shift bias” or “recalibration” in program evaluation -- that is, a shift in metric from before to after an intervention which is caused by the intervention itself and may lead to underestimates of program effects.

Keywords: Measurement invariance; measurement equivalence; response bias; response-shift bias; stochastic frontier analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C5 I1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2010-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://faculty.ses.wsu.edu/WorkingPapers/Galinato/WP2010_10.pdf First version, 2010 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (http://faculty.ses.wsu.edu/WorkingPapers/Galinato/WP2010_10.pdf [307 Temporary Redirect]--> https://ses.wsu.edu/faculty/)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsu:wpaper:rosenman-10

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from School of Economic Sciences, Washington State University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Danielle Engelhardt ().