Is the Vineland-3 Comprehensive Interview Form a Multidimensional or Unidimensional Scale? Structural Analysis of Subdomain Scores Across Early Childhood to Adulthood

Abstract

As the Vineland Scales are among the most relevant, well-developed, and popular measures of adaptive behavior available for use, this study evaluated the factor structure and dimensionality of the Vineland-3 Comprehensive Interview Form. Drawing data from 2,560 participants in the norming sample, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were completed across two independent samples from four age-groups ranging from preschool-age children to adults. Results from exploratory factor analysis revealed evidence for a unidimensional model across age-groups, but results from confirmatory factor analysis indicated that multidimensional models were better fitting than unidimensional models for each age-group. Discussion focuses on whether the Vineland-3 Comprehensive Interview Form is truly a unidimensional or multidimensional measure.

Factor structure of the VABS-3 Comprehensive Parent/Caregiver form in autistic individuals: Poor fit of three-factor and unidimensional models

“…Domains represented each factor (Communication, Daily Living Skills, and Socialization) and subdomains were utilized as item units. This replicates procedures used in prior research (Dovgan et al, 2019;Farmer et al, 2021), including in the measure's original validation (Sparrow et al, 1984). Because of potential measurement differences between MV and verbal individuals, analyses were performed separately on each group.…”

“…Recently, Farmer and colleagues (2021) performed analyses of the CIF in four age groups in the standardization sample. In oblique (promax) rotated exploratory factor analyses (EFAs) using V-scale scores, they found that the original factor structure emerged for ages 3–5 years, but it changed in older groups (Table 1).…”

“…These results demonstrate that how the information is collected, either through a trained interviewer or through informant-report questionnaire, is affecting the instrument. However, CFA were not performed using the current theoretical three-factor structure, so outside of the Interview form examined by Farmer and colleagues (2021), the appropriateness of this structure for these forms is not clear.…”

“…After poor fit precluded planned invariance analyses, post hoc analyses were conducted to determine whether a unidimensional structure better represents adaptive behavior in the current data set. For comparability to Farmer and colleagues (2021), analyses were repeated for four age groups (3–5, 6–11, 12–18, and 19–29 years) to explore if the structure was appropriate for specific ages.…”

Disentangling global and domain‐level adaptive behavior trajectories among children with autism spectrum disorder

“…It is important to note that the findings from the FOCUS model pertain specifically to a hierarchical modeling procedure, and not to the use of domain‐level scores independently as a univariate outcome, because the domain‐level scores contain information primarily about the global construct. Interestingly, recent psychometric works suggested that in general samples, the domain‐level scores may not contain information beyond the composite score (Farmer, Floyd, & McNicholas, 2021; Pandolfi & Magyar, 2021). The discrepant results in this study may be explained by the differences in population (ASD versus normative) or the nature of the data (longitudinal versus cross‐sectional).…”