Abstract
Background: The Short Form 12-item Health Survey (SF-12v2) was originally developed in English, but it is also available in Hong Kong (HK) Chinese. While both language versions had their measurement properties well assessed in their respective populations, their measurement invariance in scores has not been examined. Therefore, we aimed to assess their measurement invariance. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study on individuals aged 18 years or older at a university campus. Those who were bilingual in English and Chinese were randomly assigned to self-complete either the standard English or the HK Chinese SF-12v2. Measurement invariance of the two components and eight scales of the SF-12v2 was concluded if the corresponding 90% confidence interval (CI) for the difference between the two language versions entirely fell within the minimal clinically important difference of ±3 units. Multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was also performed. Results: A total of 1013 participants completed the SF-12v2 (496 in English and 517 in HK Chinese), with a mean age of 22 years (Range 18–58), and 626 participants (62%) were female. There were no significant differences in demographics. Only the physical and mental components and the mental health (MH) scale had their 90% CIs (0.21 to 1.61, − 1.00 to 0.98, and − 0.86 to 2.84, respectively) completely fall within the ±3 units. The multiple-group CFA showed partial strict invariance. Conclusions: The English and HK Chinese versions of the SF-12v2 can be used in studies with their two components and MH scores pooled in the analysis.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 14 |
Number of pages | 8 |
Journal | Health and Quality Life Outcomes |
Volume | 19 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2021 |
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© The Author(s) 2021. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.Keywords
- Chinese language
- confirmatory factor analysis
- demography
- structural equation model