Examining the latent structure of Sense of Social and Academic Fit

Maghsoodi, Amir Homayoon

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/113150 Copy

Description

Title

Examining the latent structure of Sense of Social and Academic Fit

Author(s)

Maghsoodi, Amir Homayoon

Issue Date

2021-07-08

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Ruedas-Gracia, Nidia

Committee Member(s)

• Neville, Helen A
• Xia, Yan

Department of Study

Educational Psychology

Discipline

Educational Psychology

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

M.S.

Degree Level

Thesis

Keyword(s)

• sense of belonging
• social fit
• college students
• factor analysis
• scale development
• measurement invariance

Abstract

Sense of belonging is a psychological construct that has been theorized to be a fundamental human need and shown to have important implications in many domains of life, including academic achievement. The Sense of Social and Academic Fit Scale (Walton & Cohen, 2007) has been widely used to assess sense of college belonging among undergraduate college students, particularly to explore academic disparities across lines of gender, social class, and race/ethnicity. Despite its wide use, the instrument’s latent factor structure and measurement invariance properties have not been reported in the published literature to date. Moreover, the need for short measures has led researchers to use subsets of the scale’s items without an established theoretical or statistical basis. Thus, I sought to examine and validate the factor structure of this scale, to analyze its measurement invariance properties across the demographic categories listed above, and to derive and validate a brief measure of college belonging using a subset of the original scale’s items. Single-factor models of the full measure showed poor fit to the data, and inspection of local misfit suggested the presence of multiple correlated factors. Exploratory factor analyses recovered a four-factor model with the following latent factors: Institutional Belonging, Cultural Match, Social Acceptance, and Social Capital. Additionally, a brief five-item measure was derived that matched the Institutional Belonging factor of the full measure. This brief measure explained a substantial amount of the variance from the full measure and showed added benefits, such as external validity in an independent dataset, strict invariance across social class and race/ethnicity, and metric invariance across gender. The other models did not achieve measurement invariance in any category, nor did they show acceptable fit with an independent dataset. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Graduation Semester

2021-08

Type of Resource

Thesis

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/113150

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2021 Amir Maghsoodi

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