Measurement Invariance and Quality of Attitudes Towards Immigration in the European Social Survey

Abstract

The number of studies assessing measurement invariance of the European Social Survey's (ESS) immigration scale increased in recent years. However, the comparability of findings is limited due to the lack of consistency in the analytic strategies and methods employed across these studies. The present study aims to address this issue by employing a consistent approach: a multigroup confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA), to test for measurement invariance of attitudes towards immigration in each of the first nine rounds of the ESS. Moreover, we estimate the measurement quality by computing the reliability coefficient Omega in each country in each round of the ESS. Our results reveal that metric invariance holds for all countries but one (Finland) in all rounds, indicating that covariances and regression coefficients can be compared meaningfully. While scalar invariance only holds for different subgroups of countries within each round, partial invariance is fulfilled in all countries, meaning that at least one indicator is equal for all countries allowing for latent mean comparisons. Furthermore, assessing the measurement quality, we find the attitudes towards immigration index similarly good across the different countries and rounds.