Confirmatory Factor Analytic Structure and Measurement Invariance of the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents in a Longitudinal Sample of Adolescents

While adolescence is a critical stage of development marked by heightened bottom-up emotional reactivity and immature top-down regulatory control, research on emotion regulation has relatively neglected middle childhood to adolescence years. This may be attributed to the limited number and scope of age-appropriate, reliable, and valid measures of emotion regulation. This study examines the confirmatory factor analytic structure and measurement invariance of the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (ERQ-CA), a 10-item self-report measure designed to measure habitual use of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, across a 1-year time interval in school samples of adolescents. Results indicate low test-retest reliability but high to acceptable internal consistency over a 1-year time period. The two-factor model has an approximate but close fit to the data collected, which is consistent with underlying theoretical framework and prior empirical findings. Tests of measurement equivalence support strong invariance, indicating that there were no statistically significant differences in factor means, variances, and correlations over a 1-year interval.