Factor structure and gender invariance of the Chinese General Self-Efficacy Scale among soon-to-be-aged adults

Aim: The aim of the study was to examine the factor structure of the Chinese General Self-Efficacy Scale and gender invariance in the structure.

Background: The General Self-Efficacy Scale was developed in 1981 and revised in 1995 to measure people's beliefs or expectations about their ability to perform tasks on their own across a wide range of demanding/novel situations. While the Chinese version of the General Self-Efficacy Scale has been examined for adolescents and adults from clinical populations, its psychometric properties for community-dwelling Chinese soon-to-be-aged adults, who are in a transitional stage from adulthood to later life, have not been tested. Females have consistently reported a lower general self-efficacy level than males, but it is unclear whether the difference is a result of response bias of the inventory by gender.

Method: A convenience sample of Chinese soon-to-be-aged adults (n = 695) in 28 non-government organizations in Hong Kong completed the survey from March to May 2005. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to test the factor structure and multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis to test the gender invariance of the Chinese version of the General Self-Efficacy Scale.

Results: The proposed factor structure of the Chinese version of the General Self-Efficacy Scale was an excellent fit to the overall data, and held equally well for both males and females, both genders demonstrating an equivalent pattern of factor loadings. The Cronbach alpha value was high (0·89).

Conclusion: The Chinese version of the General Self-Efficacy is a reliable and valid scale and both genders responded to it using the same framework and metric, thus allowing it to be used with confidence in non-clinical Chinese soon-to-be-aged adult samples.