Comparing Social Anxiety Between Asian Americans and European Americans: An Examination of Measurement Invariance

Abstract

There have been over 30 studies and two meta-analyses comparing social anxiety between Asian Americans and European Americans. However, few have investigated the invariance of social anxiety measures that would make these comparisons appropriate. In the current study, we systematically examined psychometric properties and configural, metric, and scalar invariance of five social anxiety measures and four short forms that have been used more than once to compare Asian Americans ( n = 232) and European Americans ( n = 193). We found that four (i.e., SPS-6, SIAS-6, SPS, and SPAI-18) of the nine scales were scalar invariant, three scales (i.e., SIAS, SPAI, and B-FNES) only achieved configural invariance, and two scales (i.e., FNES and SADS) failed to achieve configural invariance. Latent mean comparisons based on the scalar invariant measures revealed higher social anxiety scores for Asian Americans than European Americans. The findings are discussed with regard to the issues and challenges when comparing social anxiety among different cultural and ethnic groups.

From self-construal to threat appraisal: Understanding cultural differences in social anxiety between Asian Americans and European Americans.

“…We hope this effort would help us begin to understand the complexities of how cultural beliefs about the self in relation to others may shape what is attended to in a social situation and the subsequent affective response. Consistent with Hypothesis 1, our results replicated previous findings regarding cultural differences in social anxiety (Hsu et al, 2012;Krieg & Xu, 2015;Krieg et al, 2016;Lau et al, 2009;Norasakkunkit & Kalick, 2009;Okazaki, 1997;Woody et al, 2015) and self-construals (Krieg & Xu, 2015;Norasakkunkit & Kalick, 2002;Okazaki, 2000;Singelis, 1994) between Asian Americans and European Americans. These findings are consistent with Markus and Kitayama's (1991) original conceptualization of cultural differences in how people of Asian and European heritage view themselves as either innately connected or autonomous when interacting with social others.…”

“…Abundant research has demonstrated higher social anxiety reported by Asian Americans than European Americans, with an average effect size estimate of d ϭ .36, 95% confidence interval (CI) [.27, .44] (Krieg & Xu, 2015). Furthermore, Krieg, Xu, and Cicero (2016) showed that this cultural difference in social anxiety was not an artifact of nonequivalent measurement properties between the two groups. Using a series of measurement invariance analyses (Little, 1997;Vandenberg & Lance, 2000), Krieg et al (2016) was able to replicate higher social anxiety among Asian Americans than European Americans based on comparison of latent group means.…”

Accelerated functional brain aging in major depressive disorder: evidence from a large scale fMRI analysis of Chinese participants

“…Some studies suggest that compared to Caucasians, the Chinese tend to deny the existence of depression [ 75 ]. Consequently, the level of depression tends to be significantly elevated when MDD is diagnosed [ 76 – 78 ].…”

Accelerated functional brain aging in major depressive disorder: evidence from a large scale fMRI analysis of Chinese participants

“…Some studies suggest that compared to Caucasians, Chinese tend to deny the existence of depression [73]. Consequently, the level of depression tends to be significantly elevated when MDD is diagnosed [74][75][76].…”