Exploration of Factor Structure and Measurement Invariance by Gender for a Modified Shortened Adapted Social Capital Assessment Tool in India

Social capital is defined as the nature of the social relationship between individuals or groups and the embedded resources available through their social network. It is considered as a critical determinant of health and well-being. Thus, it is essential to assess the performance of any tool when me...

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Published inFrontiers in psychology Vol. 10; p. 2641
Main Authors Hasan, Md Zabir, Leoutsakos, Jeannie-Marie, Story, William T, Dean, Lorraine T, Rao, Krishna D, Gupta, Shivam
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Switzerland Frontiers Media S.A 11.12.2019
Subjects
factor analysis
gender
India
measurement invariance
Psychology
social capital
factor analysis
social capital
gender
measurement invariance
India
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Summary:Social capital is defined as the nature of the social relationship between individuals or groups and the embedded resources available through their social network. It is considered as a critical determinant of health and well-being. Thus, it is essential to assess the performance of any tool when meaningfully comparing social capital between specific groups. Using measurement invariance (MI) analysis, this paper explored the factor structure of the social capital of men and women measured by a modified Shortened Adapted Social Capital Assessment Tool (SASCAT-I) in rural Uttar Pradesh (UP), India. The study sample comprised 5,287 men (18-101 years) and 7,186 women (15-45 years) from 6,218 randomly selected households who responded to SASCAT-I during a community-level cross-sectional survey. Social capital factor structure was examined by both exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and MI across genders was investigated using multigroup CFA. While disregarding gender, four unique factors ( , , , and ) represented the structure of social capital. The MI analysis presented a partial metric-invariance indicating factor loadings for and were the same across genders. The gender-stratified analysis demonstrated that a four-factor solution was best fitted for both men and women. Men and women of rural UP interpreted social capital differently as the perception of and varied across genders. For any future applications of SASCAT-I, we recommend gender-stratified factor analysis to quantify social capital's measure, acknowledging its multidimensionality.
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This article was submitted to Quantitative Psychology and Measurement, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
Reviewed by: Elena Carrillo-Alvarez, Blanquerna Ramon Llull University, Spain; Rosa M. Trenado, University of Valencia, Spain
Edited by: Yiyun Shou, Australian National University, Australia
ISSN:1664-1078
1664-1078
DOI:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02641