The Youth Self Report (YSR) is a popular and widely used instrument assessing adolescent emotional and behavioral functioning. The goals of the present study were to address some of the limitations of the YSR, to examine its factor structure and equivalence across four racial/ethnic groups, and to determine if another combination of items could accurately represent the constructs Achenbach sought to elucidate in a more parsimonious way. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were utilized with random split-half samples to determine primary and secondary factors. Correlational analyses were then performed to determine the suitability of unit-weight factors as measures of the factors. And to examine the invariance of the short form YSR over ethnic groups, the covariance matrices were compared using structural equation modeling. Results revealed a seven factor scale that is shorter (66 vs. 119 items), is invariant acrossracial/ethnic groups, and has a simple structure. Implications and future directions are discussed.
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