Psychometric Validation of the Revised Family Affluence Scale: a Latent Variable Approach

Child Indicators Research, Oct 2015

The aim was to develop and test a brief revised version of the family affluence scale. A total of 7120 students from Denmark, Greenland, Italy, Norway, Poland, Romania, Scotland and Slovakia reported on a list of 16 potential indicators of affluence. Responses were subject to item screening and test of dimensionality. Bifactor analysis revealed a strong general factor of affluence in all countries, but with additional specific factors in all countries. The specific factors mainly reflected overlapping item content. Item screening was conducted to eliminate items with low discrimination and local dependence, reducing the number of items from sixteen to six: Number of computers, number of cars, own bedroom, holidays abroad, dishwasher, and bathroom. The six-item version was estimated with Samejima’s graded response model, and tested for differential item functioning by country. Three of the six items were invariant across countries, thus anchoring the scale to a common metric across countries. The six-item scale correlated with parental reported income groups in six out of eight countries. Findings support a revision to six items in the family affluence scale.

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Psychometric Validation of the Revised Family Affluence Scale: a Latent Variable Approach

Child Ind Res Psychometric Validation of the Revised Family Affluence Scale: a Latent Variable Approach Torbjørn Torsheim 0 1 2 4 5 6 7 8 Franco Cavallo 0 1 2 4 5 6 7 8 Kate Ann Levin 0 1 2 4 5 6 7 8 Christina Schnohr 0 1 2 4 5 6 7 8 Joanna Mazur 0 1 2 4 5 6 7 8 Birgit Niclasen 0 1 2 4 5 6 7 8 Candace Currie 0 1 2 4 5 6 7 8 the FAS Development Study Group 0 1 2 4 5 6 7 8 0 Department of Public Health and Pediatrics, University of Turin , Turin , Italy 1 Department of Psychosocial Science, University of Bergen , Postbox 7800, 5020 Bergen , Norway 2 The FAS Development Study Group: Adriana Baban , Hege Bye, Pernille Due, Zuzana Dankulincova Veselska, Andrea Geckova, Jane Hartley, Bjørn Holstein, Jo Inchley, Patrizia Lemma, Oddrun Samdal 3 Torbjørn Torsheim 4 School of Medicine, Medical & Biological Sciences, University of St. Andrews , Scotland , UK 5 National Institute of Public Health, University of Southern Denmark , Odense , Denmark 6 Department of Child and Adolescent Health, Institute of Mother and Child , Warsaw , Poland 7 Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen , Copenhagen , Denmark 8 NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde, Public Health Directorate , Glasgow G12 0HX , UK The aim was to develop and test a brief revised version of the family affluence scale. A total of 7120 students from Denmark, Greenland, Italy, Norway, Poland, Romania, Scotland and Slovakia reported on a list of 16 potential indicators of affluence. Responses were subject to item screening and test of dimensionality. Bifactor analysis revealed a strong general factor of affluence in all countries, but with additional specific factors in all countries. The specific factors mainly reflected overlapping item content. Item screening was conducted to eliminate items with low discrimination and local dependence, reducing the number of items from sixteen to six: Number of computers, number of cars, own bedroom, holidays abroad, dishwasher, and bathroom. The six-item version was estimated with Samejima's graded response model, and tested for differential item functioning by country. Three of the six items were invariant across countries, thus anchoring the scale to a common metric across countries. The six-item - scale correlated with parental reported income groups in six out of eight countries. Findings support a revision to six items in the family affluence scale. 1 Introduction Research on health inequality, child poverty and living standards rely on quantitative indicators of family wealth. Household income or consumption expenditure is in some studies the preferred indicator of wealth, but additional indicators are needed in studies that involve child or adolescent self-report. Child and adolescent surveys typically do not include parents as informants, and for children and adolescents, accurate information about parental income might not be accessible. An alternative to income-based measures of family wealth, sometimes referred to as the Bassets approach^ (Howe et al. 2008; Sahn and Stifel 2003) , is to ask the child or their parents directly about the material conditions in the family (Doku et al. 2010; Traynor and Raykov 2013; Wardle et al. 2002) . The assets approach requires children and adolescents to report on family ownership of goods and/or families access to services that are required for an acceptable standard of living. An index of family wealth is obtained by summing across indicators (Doku et al. 2010; Wardle et al. 2002) . In general, assets-based indices can be used to assign a measure or ‘score’ of wealth along a gradient, or to create a cutoff that classifies families as below or above the poverty line, either defined by statistical or by consensual principles (Mack and Lansley 1985) . Indices based on the Bassets approach^ are flexible in that they can be used as the outcome of interest or as a stratification variable in studies of health inequality. The current study presents findings on the development and revision of the family affluence scale (FAS), a brief assets-based measure of family wealth that was designed for use in adolescent surveys. The family affluence scale (Currie et al. 1997, 2008) was developed within the BHealth Behaviour in School-Aged Children study^ (HBSC) as measure of family wealth. FAS was initially devised for use at a national level (Currie et al. 1997) but soon after adopted for the cross-national HBSC, as a valid comparative measure of family affluence across Europe and North America. Since the initial development, FAS has been widely used in research papers (Currie et al. 2008) , indicating its relevance within the adolescent research community. Studies have documented the measurement properties of the scale among school-aged children and adolescents in geographically diverse samples (Boudreau and Poulin 2009; Currie et al. 1997; Kehoe and O’Hare 2010; Liu et al. 2012; Molcho et al. 2007) . Like other asset-based indicators, the family affluence scale needs t (...truncated)


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Torbjørn Torsheim, Franco Cavallo, Kate Ann Levin, Christina Schnohr, Joanna Mazur, Birgit Niclasen, Candace Currie, the FAS Development Study Group. Psychometric Validation of the Revised Family Affluence Scale: a Latent Variable Approach, Child Indicators Research, 2016, pp. 771-784, Volume 9, Issue 3, DOI: 10.1007/s12187-015-9339-x