Measurement Invariance in Comparing Attitudes Toward Immigrants Among Youth Across Europe in 1999 and 2009

Abstract

This study applies the alignment method, a technique for assessing measurement equivalence across many groups, to the analysis of adolescents’ support for immigrants’ rights in a pooled data set from the 1999 International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) Civic Education Study and the 2009 IEA International Civics and Citizenship Education Study. We examined measurement invariance across 92 groups (country by cohort by gender), finding that a five-item scale was statistically well-grounded for unbiased group comparisons despite the presence of significant noninvariance in some groups. Using the resulting group mean scores, we compared European youth’s attitudes finding that female students had more positive attitudes than did male students across countries and cohorts. An analysis of countries participating in both studies revealed that students in most countries demonstrated more positive attitudes in 2009 than in 1999. The alignment methodology makes it feasible to comprehensively assess measurement invariance in large data sets and to compute aligned factor scores for the full sample that can update existing databases for more efficient further secondary analysis and with metainformation concerning measurement invariance.