Cross-Language Measurement Equivalence of Parenting Measures for Use With Mexican American Populations

Increasing diversity among families in the United States often necessitates the translation of common measures into various languages. However, even when great care is taken during translations, empirical evaluations of measurement equivalence are necessary. The current study demonstrates the analytic techniques researchers should use to evaluate the measurement equivalence of translated measures. To this end we investigated the cross-language measurement equivalence of several common parenting measures in a sample of 749 Mexican American families. The item invariance results indicated similarity of factor structures across language groups for each of the parenting measures for both mothers and children. Construct validity tests indicated similar slope relations between each of the 4 parenting measures and the outcomes across the 2 language groups for both mothers and children. Equivalence in intercepts, however, was only achieved for some outcomes. These findings indicate that the use of these measures in both within-group and between-group analyses based on correlation/covariance structure is defensible, but researchers are cautioned against interpretations of mean level differences across these language groups.