Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, UK.
Assessment. 2024 Dec;31(8):1687-1701. doi: 10.1177/10731911241229573. Epub 2024 Feb 12.
Psychological distress often onsets during adolescence, necessitating an accurate understanding of its development. Assessing change in distress is based on the seldom examined premise of longitudinal measurement invariance (MI). Thus, we used three waves of data from Next Steps, a representative cohort of young people in the UK ( = 13,539) to examine MI of the General Health Questionnaire-12 (GHQ-12). We examined MI across time and gender from ages 15 to 25 in four competing latent models: (a) a single-factor model, (b) a three-factor correlated model, (c) a bifactor model of "general distress" and two orthogonal specific factors capturing positive and negative wording, and (d) a single-factor model including error covariances of negatively phrased items. We also tested acceptability of assumptions underlying sum score models. For all factor models, residual MI was confirmed from ages 15 to 25 years and across gender. The bifactor model had the best fit. While sum score model fit was not unequivocally acceptable, most mean differences across time and gender were equivalent across sum scores and latent difference scores. Thus, GHQ-12 sum scores may be used to assess change in psychological distress in young people. However, latent scores appear more accurate, and model fit can be improved by accounting for item wording.
心理困扰通常在青春期开始出现，因此需要准确了解其发展过程。评估困扰的变化基于纵向测量不变性（MI）的很少被检验的前提。因此，我们使用了来自英国年轻人代表性队列 Next Steps 的三波数据（n=13539），来检验一般健康问卷-12（GHQ-12）的 MI。我们在四个竞争的潜在模型中检验了从 15 岁到 25 岁的时间和性别上的 MI：（a）单因素模型，（b）三因素相关模型，（c）“一般困扰”的双因素模型和两个正交的特定因素，捕捉积极和消极的措辞，以及（d）包括负面措辞项目误差协方差的单因素模型。我们还测试了总分模型假设的可接受性。对于所有因素模型，从 15 岁到 25 岁，以及跨性别，残余 MI 都得到了确认。双因素模型具有最佳的拟合度。虽然总分模型的拟合度并不明确，但大多数时间和性别上的平均差异在总分和潜在差异分数上是相等的。因此，GHQ-12 总分可用于评估年轻人心理困扰的变化。然而，潜在分数似乎更准确，并且通过考虑项目措辞，可以提高模型拟合度。
