Psychometric Validation of Constructs Defined by Ordinal-Valued Items

Anastasia Charalampi (), Catherine Michalopoulou () and Clive Richardson ()
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Anastasia Charalampi: Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences
Catherine Michalopoulou: Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences
Clive Richardson: Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences

Chapter Chapter 20 in Demography of Population Health, Aging and Health Expenditures, 2020, pp 319-333 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Determining the structure and assessing the psychometric properties of constructs (scales) before their use is a prerequisite of scaling theory. This involves splitting randomly a sample of adequate size into two halves and first performing exploratory factor analysis (EFA) on one half-sample in order to assess the construct validity of the scale. Secondly, the structure suggested by EFA is validated by carrying out confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) on the second half. Based on the full sample, the psychometric properties of the resulting scales or subscales are assessed. The appropriate methods of analysis depend on the level of measurement of the items defining the scale. In this paper, we carry out the investigation and assessment of the 2012 European Social Survey (ESS) short eight-item version of the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CES-D 8) scale for Italy and Spain when items are considered as ordinal. In both countries, EFA performed on the first half-samples resulted in a one-factor solution based on all eight items of the scale. CFA performed on the second half-samples and the full samples resulted in adequate model fit for both countries. The analysis confirmed the unidimensionality of the CES-D 8 scale that was both reliable and valid. Further research is necessary in every country for both rounds of the ESS that included the depression measurement (2006 and 2012) in order to establish that the CES-D 8 is suitable for use in analyses.

Keywords: Depression; CES-D 8; Exploratory factor analysis; Confirmatory factor analysis; Reliability; Construct validity; European Social Survey (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:ssdmcp:978-3-030-44695-6_20

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-44695-6_20

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