Luo Jie, Tang Fu-Chuan, Yang Ren, Gong Jie, Yao Cheng-Kui, Huang Xinquan, Chen Wei, Zhao Shuo-Ying
School of Psychology, Guizhou Normal University, Guiyang, China.
Office of Academic Research, University of Finance and Economics, Hangzhou, China.
Front Psychol. 2022 Oct 25;13:1001548. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1001548. eCollection 2022.
The Meaning in Life Questionnaire (MLQ) is a popular tool to measure the presence of and one's search for meaning in life. Although the validity of the MLQ has been verified in previous studies, the evidence from longitudinal measurement invariance (LMI) of the MLQ is still lacking. The current study aimed to examine the LMI of the MLQ in a sample of Chinese college students ( = 328) at a 1-year interval. Multigroup confirmatory factor analysis (MCFA) was used to examine the LMI of the MLQ over four time points (over the course of 1 year). Results indicate that the MLQ has strict longitudinal invariance across 1-year in Chinese college students, and the latent means difference of MLQ-P is not significant differences across time, while the latent means difference of MLQ-S show significant differences between Time 1 and the other time points. Moreover, the internal consistency reliabilities (e.g., alpha and omega) of the MLQ scores were acceptable at all four time points, and the stability coefficients across time were moderate. These findings provide preliminary evidence that the MLQ has satisfactory longitudinal properties in Chinese college students.
生活意义问卷（MLQ）是一种用于测量生活意义的存在以及个体对生活意义追求的常用工具。尽管MLQ的效度在以往研究中已得到验证，但关于MLQ纵向测量不变性（LMI）的证据仍然不足。本研究旨在对328名中国大学生样本进行为期一年的间隔研究，以检验MLQ的LMI。采用多组验证性因素分析（MCFA）来检验MLQ在四个时间点（一年期间）的LMI。结果表明，MLQ在中国大学生中具有严格的一年纵向不变性，MLQ-P的潜在均值差异在各时间点之间不显著，而MLQ-S的潜在均值差异在时间1与其他时间点之间存在显著差异。此外，MLQ分数在所有四个时间点的内部一致性信度（如α系数和ω系数）均可接受，且各时间点之间的稳定性系数适中。这些发现提供了初步证据，表明MLQ在中国大学生中具有令人满意的纵向特性。
