Measurement equivalence of the (CES-D) scale for hispanic and Asian immigrants

Purpose: Depression is a fundamental construct of psychological adjustment among adolescents. Particularly, the CES-D scale has been widely used for diverse ethnic groups to assess their current levels of depression symptoms. However, there have been few studies examining the structure of the CES-D within an ethnic group by nativity among adolescents. Therefore, we examine the measurement equivalence of the CES-D scale between foreign- and native-born adolescents for both Hispanic and Asian groups.

Method: The data came from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (add health). The analytic sample of this study included 5,274 Hispanic and Asian adolescents from the 1996 in-home survey (Wave 2). Nineteen questions regarding specific depression symptoms were employed to evaluate the equivalence of the modified version of the CES-D. Our analytical strategic consisted of three parts: 1) Internal Consistency Analysis, 2) within-group Confirmatory Factor Analysis, and 3) multi-group Confirmatory Factor Analysis.

Results: The results of the internal consistency analyses showed that the CES-D nineteen items had acceptable reliability between foreign- and native-born adolescents for both Hispanic and Asian. Second, the four-factor CFA models for the CES-D nineteen items appeared to fit for each groups. Third, the multi-group CFA models showed the equivalence of the measurement properties (i.e., factor pattern, factor loading, measurement error, and factor variance/covariance) between both groups.

Conclusion: Our findings showed that the indicators of the CES-D scale are equivalent between foreign- and native-born adolescents for both groups. Therefore, the CES-D is applicable to foreign- and native-born adolescents from the Add-Health study.