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-EsteemScales (CASES), was dev eloped to measure the self-concepts of the young people in Hong Kong in sev en aspects: social, academic, appearance, moral, family, physical/sport, an d general self-esteem. LISREL procedures were utilized to test the extent o f factorial invariance for age and gender based on the responses to CASES o f 551 Hong Kong adolescents. It was found that CASES possesses the necessar y invariance properties for between-group measurement in terms of the numbe r and pattern of the underlying factors, item factor loadings, and inter-fa ctor relations, but not in terms of item uniqueness. Implications of these findings are discussed in terms of the use of CASES and of empirical suppor t for the equivalence of self-concept factor structure for age and gender g roups for both Western and non-Western adolescents.