The aim of the present study was to evaluate the measurement invariance of the School Connectedness Scale for Chinese, Canadian, and Tanzanian adolescents, and to explore the inter association between school connectedness and cyberbullying/cybervictimization. Participants included 3872 adolescents from urban settings in China ( N= 2053, M age=16.36 years, SD = 1.14 years; 44.6% boys), Canada ( N = 642, M age = 12.13 years, SD = 0.77 years; 50.1% boys), and Tanzania ( N = 1056 , M age=15.87 years, SD = 2.03 years; 52.8% boys). Adolescents self-reported their cybervictimization and cyberbullying experiences, as well as their perceived school connectedness. Multigroup Confirmatory Factor Analysis revealed an approximate measurement invariance of the scale across the three countries. Chinese students showed the lowest levels of school connectedness while Tanzanian students showed the highest. The findings of the multivariate multigroup regression analyses across the three countries revealed similar relationships between school connectedness and cyberbullying/cybervictimization, thus broadening our understanding of school connectedness and its relationship to cyberbullying/cybervictimization across these three different countries.
Abstract. The current study aimed to test for measurement invariance of the Resistance to Peer Influence scale across samples of Chinese, Canadian, and Tanzanian. Participants included N = 3,771 students from four public schools in China ( N = 2,073, Mage = 16.36 years, SD = 1.14 years; 925 boys), from sixteen public schools in Canada ( N = 642, Mage = 12.13 years, SD = 0.78 years; 321 boys), and from four public schools in Tanzanian ( N = 1,056, Mage = 15.87 years, SD = 2.02 years; 558 boys). Students provided self-reports of resistance to peer influence. The results from multigroup confirmatory factor analysis and the alignment optimization method demonstrated that configural, metric, and partial scalar invariances of resistance to peer influence held across gender and all three countries. Chinese boys had the highest factor mean levels and Canadian boys had the lowest. The findings help us understand peer influence resistance across cultures and genders.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.