Assessing the measurement invariance of the Brief Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale in Chinese and American adolescents

This study evaluated the measurement invariance of the Brief Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale (BMSLSS) and latent means across early adolescents from two diverse cultural settings, China and America.

We sampled 2045 middle school students (960 males) from China and 1747 middle school students (887 males) from America. Confirmatory factor analysis and multi-group confirmatory factor analysis were performed to examine the factor structure and the measurement equivalence across the two cultures and then examined latent mean differences between Chinese early adolescents and American early adolescents.

Results of confirmatory factor analyses provided support for the expected one-factor structure. And a series of multi-group confirmatory factor analyses supported full configural invariance, full metric invariance, and partial scalar invariance between the two groups. These findings suggest that the BMSLSS may provide acceptable comparisons and meaningful correlates across the two differing cultures. Subsequent analyses of latent means indicated the suitability of the BMSLSS for conducting mean comparisons and revealed significant differences between Chinese early adolescents and American early adolescents.

The BMSLSS appears to be suitable for cross-cultural studies between Chinese and American early adolescents. Chinese early adolescents reported lower life satisfaction than early American adolescents.