2014 · Study · English
The Development of the ADSI: Construct Validity for the Communities That Care Youth Survey
Corrigan, M. J.
Corrigan, M. J. (2014). The Development of the ADSI: Construct Validity for the Communities That Care Youth Survey. Journal of Child & Adolescent Substance Abuse, 23(6), 347–358. doi.org/10.1080/1067828x.2014.928139
Summary
Construct-validity study using a convenience sample of 26,781 Communities That Care Youth Surveys collected in New York State. The author ran a principal-component factor analysis to establish how many factors underlie the items and which items load on each, and compared the result with the 34 factors predicted by the Social Development Model, the theoretical basis of the survey. Thirty-two factors emerged, and the items grouped within them corresponded well enough to the model’s constructs for the author to conclude that the analysis supports the construct validity of both the Social Development Model and the survey as its operationalisation. The analysis is exploratory rather than confirmatory and comes from a single US state, so it is corroborating rather than decisive evidence, but it adds a large-sample check on the survey’s factor structure that European users may wish to replicate on their own data.