Utrecht-Management of Identity Commitments Scale (U-MICS): Greek adaptation and measurement invariance across time and ethnic groups

Abstract

The Utrecht-Management of Identity Commitments Scale (U-MICS) is one of the most-commonly used self-report scales to assess personal identity in studies of developmental processes. While it has been translated and validated in many countries around the world, evidence of its applicability in Greek is absent. The purpose of this study was to examine the factor structure of the Greek version of the U-MICS, and to test its measurement invariance across time and across ethnic groups living in Greece. Using data from 811 adolescents (M age = 12.57, SD age = 0.49 at Wave 1, 45.9% girls, 47.1% immigrant), Confirmatory Factor Analyses on the Greek U-MICS supported its well-established three-factor structure. Even though testing invariance of the educational U-MICS showed mixed results, the factor structure and the measurement properties of the interpersonal U-MICS were found to be comparable across ethnic groups, and across three years of junior high school. Finally, the bivariate associations of the three dimensions of the U-MICS with indices of adaptation (self-esteem, and emotional symptoms) partially supported the convergent validity of the scale. This study adds to the existing pool of studies supporting the applicability of the U-MICS in different languages and ethnic groups.

Developmental Interplay between Ethnic, National, and Personal Identity in Immigrant Adolescents

“…Participants responded to these items on a scale from 1 ( completely untrue ) to 5 ( completely true ). This scale has been translated and used in many languages and has been shown to be measurement invariant in many countries (Crocetti et al, 2015 ), including Greece (Mastrotheodoros et al, 2021 ). The internal consistency coefficients for the two dimensions were acceptable, ranging from 0.74 to 0.83 across scales and waves (see Table 1 ).…”

“…As a third preliminary step, using the semTools package in R (Jorgensen et al, 2020 ), a series of measurement invariance analyses were performed to test whether the underlying meaning of the scales differed across time for the ethnic identity and national identity scales (MEIM), but not for the UMICS scale because longitudinal measurement invariance has already been shown (Mastrotheodoros et al, 2021 ). The semTools package uses algorithms that allow latent variable models estimation over multiply imputed data and pools the results.…”

Developmental Interplay Between Ethnic, National, and Personal Identity in Immigrant Adolescents

“…Participants responded to these items on a scale from 1 (completely untrue) to 5 (completely true). This scale has been translated and used in many languages and has been shown to be measurement invariant in many countries (Crocetti et al 2015), including Greece (Mastrotheodoros et al 2021). The internal consistency coefficients for the two dimensions were acceptable, ranging from .74 to .83 across scales and waves (see Table 1).…”

“…As a third preliminary step, using the semTools package in R (Jorgensen et al 2020), a series of measurement invariance analyses were performed to test whether the underlying meaning of the scales differed across time for the ethnic identity and national identity scales (MEIM), but not for the UMICS scale because longitudinal measurement invariance has already been shown (Mastrotheodoros et al 2021). The semTools package uses algorithms that allow latent variable models estimation over multiply imputed data and pools the results.…”