| The development of a positive self-concept has been stated as a principal goal of education. Unfortunately, the assessment of self-concept is rarely undertaken in the schools. Many self-concept measures have limited technical adequacy, poor normative samples, and there is a lack of comparability of scores across other self-concept measures. The Multidimensional Self Concept Scale (MSCS) improves upon existing self-concept measures and currently is viewed as the most psychometrically sound instrument for the assessment of self-concept. In spite of its excellent psychometric properties, it has not yet been determined if the factor structure of the MSCS for male and female students is similar to that reported in the MSCS manual. Moreover, the invariance of the factor structure across gender has not been examined. Structural equation modeling was used to compute separate goodness-of-fit statistics of Bracken's self-concept model for 396 male and 416 female students in grades 5 to 12. Given the MSCS's length, item parceling was used to create 2 eight-item and 1 nine-item parcels for each factor. The parceling was accomplished using the isolated uniqueness strategy, because the items within a domain were fairly unidimensional. Items were parceled together based on factor loadings. A marginally acceptable fit of Bracken's model provided limited support to the first-order factor model of the MSCS, while the results indicated a poor to approaching marginal fit for the data to the second-order factor model. These findings tentatively support the conclusion that the MSCS is a valid measure of the self-concept construct specified by Bracken, at least when administered to the current sample. Similarly, there was limited support for the invariance of the MSCS factor structure across gender. The goodness-of-fit statistics for the five tests of invariance among the first- and higher-order factor models were indicative of a marginally acceptable fitting model. These findings provisionally suggest that the MSCS factor structure is invariant for these male and female students. |
