The Impact of Partial Factorial Invariance on Cross-Group Comparisons.

This study explored the impact of partial factorial invariance on cross-group comparisons of latent variables, including latent means, latent variances, structural relations (or correlations) with other constructs, and regression coefficients as predicting external variables. The results indicate that the estimates of factor mean differences are sensitive to violations of invariance on both factor loadings and intercepts. Noninvariant factor loadings were also found to influence the cross-group comparisons of factor variances and regression coefficients (slopes, in the raw metric) with external variables.