School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Nanjing University, 163 Xianlin Avenue, Qixia District, Nanjing, 210023, Jiangsu, China.
Laboratory for Traumatic Stress Studies, CAS Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
BMC Geriatr. 2019 Nov 15;19(1):313. doi: 10.1186/s12877-019-1346-1.
Anxiety symptoms are pervasive among elderly populations around the world. The Geriatric Anxiety Inventory (the GAI) has been developed and widely used in screening those suffering from severe symptoms. Although debates about its dimensionality have been mostly resolved by Molde et al. (2019) with bifactor modeling, evidence regarding its measurement invariance across sex and somatic diseases is still missing.
This study attempted to provide complemental evidence to the dimensionality debates of the GAI with Mokken scale analysis and to examine its measurement invariance across sex and somatic diseases by conducting differential item functioning (DIF) analysis among a sample of older Chinese adults. The data was from responses of a large representative sample (N = 1314) in the Chinese National Survey Data Archive, focusing on the mental health of elderly adults.
The results of Mokken scale analysis confirmed the unidimensionality of the GAI, and DIF analysis indicated measurement invariance of this inventory across individuals with different sex and somatic diseases, with just a few items exhibiting item bias but all of them negligible.
All these findings supported the use of this inventory among Chinese elders to screen anxiety symptoms and to make comparisons across sex and somatic diseases.
焦虑症状在世界各地的老年人群体中普遍存在。老年焦虑量表（GAI）已经开发出来并广泛用于筛选那些患有严重症状的患者。尽管莫尔德等人（2019 年）通过双因素模型对其维度的争议进行了大部分解决，但关于其在性别和躯体疾病方面的测量不变性的证据仍然缺乏。
本研究试图通过莫克恩规模分析为 GAI 的维度争议提供补充证据，并通过对中国老年人的大样本代表性样本（N=1314）进行差异项目功能（DIF）分析，来检验其在性别和躯体疾病方面的测量不变性。数据来自中国国家调查数据档案中对老年人心理健康的一项大型代表性样本的反应。
莫克恩规模分析的结果证实了 GAI 的单维性，DIF 分析表明，该量表在具有不同性别和躯体疾病的个体中具有测量不变性，只有少数项目表现出项目偏差，但所有偏差都可以忽略不计。
所有这些发现都支持在中国老年人中使用该量表来筛查焦虑症状，并在性别和躯体疾病方面进行比较。
