Establishing the measurement invariance of the Very Short Form of the Infant Behavior Questionnaire Revised for mothers who vary on race and poverty status

We examined the measurement invariance of the Infant Behavior Questionnaire Revised–VeryShort Form (IBQR–VSF; Putnam, Helbig, Gartstein, Rothbart, andLeerkes, 2014) in a sample of470 racially (185 White, 285 African American) and socioeconomically diverse mothers (158below federal poverty threshold, 296 above federal poverty threshold) of infants. Usingmultigroup confirmatory factor analysis, we demonstrated configural, full metric, and full scalarinvariance demonstrating that the 3-factor structure (negative emotionality, positiveaffectivity/surgency, orienting/regulatory capacity), pattern of item loadings, and item meanswere comparable for White and African American mothers, and for poor and not poor mothers.In addition, we demonstrated full error invariance across racial groups and partial error varianceinvariance across poverty status, demonstrating that item reliability was comparable for Whiteand African American mothers, and both those above and below the poverty line (with theexception of a subset of items). Thus, the IBQR–VSF appears appropriate for use in racially andsocioeconomically diverse samples.