Revising the VIA-Youth: III. scale unidimensionality and measurement invariance

ABSTRACT

This article builds on two previous ones describing revisions of the VIA-Youth. The new revised version consists of 98 items. The inventory is considered appropriate for ages 8–17. A unique aspect of the revision is that the two items on the spirituality scale differ for youth ages 8–12 (VIA-Y-1) and 13–17 (VIA-Y-2). Participants in this study consisted of 94,487 youth who completed the revised VIA-Youth online or through two school districts. Unidimensionality is established for all 24 character strength scales, though doing so required freeing a small set of error covariances. Configural and metric invariance for age and gender was achieved for all scales, and scalar invariance was supported by age for all scales except for spirituality. This series of three articles presents the most thoroughly vetted measure of positive personality in youth to date.

KEYWORDS:

• Character strengths
• Via classification of strengths and virtues
• VIA-Youth
• unidimensionality
• measurement invariance

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the school personnel who helped in the data collection.

Disclosure statement

Robert McGrath is a Senior Scientist for the VIA Institute on Character, the copyright holder for the VIA-Youth.

Data availability statement

The data for this study are available upon request from the corresponding author, REM. The data are not publicly available due to the privacy policy of the VIA Institute on Character.

Additional information

Funding

The research summarized in this article was funded in part by the VIA Institute on Character.