College student and Amazon's Mechanical TURK (MTURK) samples are regularly utilized in trauma research. Recent literature, however, has criticized these samples for not being generalizable to the general U.S. population. Measurement invariance (MI) using confirmatory factor analyses (CFA), is rarely utilized in trauma research, even though the analysis can determine whether groups are invariant across factor structure, factor loadings, item intercepts, and residual error variances on a given measure of PTSD symptom severity. The purpose of this study was to determine whether college student (n = 255) and MTURK (n = 316) samples are invariant on the PCL-5. Model fit indices indicated the 7-factor Hybrid model was the best fitting model, but the 6-factor anhedonia model was the most parsimonious model. Both models demonstrated equivalence in factor structures (configural invariance), factor loadings (metric invariance), intercepts (scalar invariance), and residuals (strict invariance), indicating MTURK and college student samples are similar in regards to PTSD symptom severity. These findings provide evidence that these groups can be combined in future studies to increase sample size for trauma research. Only the Anhedonia factor exhibited mean differences between groups, which may be related to true differences between college students and MTURK survey-takers. Thus, there is further evidence that the findings from trauma studies using these populations are generalizable to each other.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:unt.edu/info:ark/67531/metadc1707346 |
| Date | 08 1900 |
| Creators | Bedford, Lee |
| Contributors | Hull, Darrell, Henson, Robin K, Savage, Melissa, Contractor, Ateka |
| Publisher | University of North Texas |
| Source Sets | University of North Texas |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | v, 60 pages, Text |
| Rights | Public, Bedford, Lee, Copyright, Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise noted. All rights Reserved. |
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