Psychological Individuation East and West: The Cross-Cultural Validity of a Brief Measure of Separation-Individuation
Year: 2016
Type: article
Abstract: The purpose of this study was to develop a brief measure of adolescent separation-individuation and test it across Western and Asian cultures.This study included two stages of analysis.Stage I developed a brief measure of separationindividuation using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Item Response Theory (IRT).The result was a 32-item Brief Measure of Separation-Individuation (BMSI) with eight subscales.In Stage II, measurement invariance analyses of the BMSI showed that full metric and partial scalar invariance held across American and Asian samples.This indicated that the relationships of the items to the latent factor of BMSI were equivalent between American and Asian adolescents.The findings of this study suggest that Functional Independence, Attitudinal Independence, and Emotional Independence may be culturally invariant separation-individuation constructs.However, Conflictual Independence seems to be more culturally dependent in that its items were only partially scalar invariant and it was only loosely related to the other separation-individuation factors, suggesting that some past work may have been incorrect to include this construct under the separation-individuation umbrella.Finally, this study demonstrated the concurrent validity of BMSI through its associations with psychiatric symptoms (i.e., BSI-18) and substance abuse.The BMSI can help researchers reduce participant response time and survey fatigue while also decreasing the numbers of parameters estimated in structural models, which allows studies of separation-individuation to be more stable for a given sample size.
Author: Ching‐Chen Chen
Institution: University of Cincinnati
Language: English
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2613647864