Measurement invariance of a Posttraumatic Stress Disorder symptoms measure (PCL-5) in college student and Amazon's mechanical TURK samples.

OBJECTIVE

College student and Amazon's Mechanical TURK (MTURK) samples are regularly utilized in trauma research. Recent literature, however, has criticized these samples for not being generalizable to the general U.S.

POPULATION: The purpose of this study was to determine whether college student (n = 255) and MTURK (n = 316) samples are invariant on the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Checklist for DSM-5.

METHOD: Measurement invariance using confirmatory factor analyses was used to determine whether groups are invariant across factor structure, factor loadings, item intercepts, and residual error variances on a given measure of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptom severity.

RESULTS

Model fit indices indicated the seven-factor Hybrid model was the best-fitting model, but the six-factor Anhedonia model was the most parsimonious model. Both models demonstrated equivalence in factor at the strictest level, indicating MTURK and college student samples are similar in regard to PTSD symptom severity.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings provide evidence that these groups can be combined in future studies to increase sample size for trauma research. Only the Anhedonia factor exhibited mean differences between groups, which may be related to true differences between college students and MTURK survey-takers. This study provides further evidence that the findings from trauma studies using these populations are generalizable to each other. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).