Age and gender invariance of self-concept factor structure: An investigation of a newly developed Chinese self-concept instrument

A new instrument, the Chinese Adolescent Self-Esteem Scales (CASES), was developed to measure the self-concepts of the young people in Hong Kong in seven aspects: social, academic, appearance, moral, family, physical/sport, and general self-esteem. LISREL procedures were utilized to test the extent of factorial invariance for age and gender based on the responses to CASES of 551 Hong Kong adolescents. It was found that CASES possesses the necessary invariance properties for between-group measurement in terms of the number and pattern of the underlying factors, item factor loadings, and inter-factor relations, but not in terms of item uniqueness. Implications of these findings are discussed in terms of the use of CASES and of empirical support for the equivalence of self-concept factor structure for age and gender groups for both Western and non-Western adolescents. © 2000 International Union of Psychological Science.