Longitudinal and Gender Measurement Invariance of the General Health Questionnaire-12 (GHQ-12) From Adolescence to Emerging Adulthood.

ABSTRACT: 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 (N = 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 acceptabil

SUBMITTER: Schlechter P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11492552 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature