Measurement Invariance: on initial CFA or revised CFA?

Posted by nnhartma on Apr 10, 2012; 12:15am
URL: http://spssx-discussion.165.s1.nabble.com/Measurement-Invariance-on-initial-CFA-or-revised-CFA-tp5628686.html

Hello:

I am testing for measurement invariance across two groups. Do I need to run measurement invariance on the initial CFA or revised CFA model? I understand how to run the measurement invariance test as well as how to interpret it.

Looking at the literature across various fields as well as several SEM texts leads me to believe that I should do a CFA for each group separately and then test the final CFA models for each group for measurement invariance. However, I am working with a 9 latent factor model which has approximately 40 items. Intuition tells me that in larger models we will always fail to find invariance (there are always items that need to be deleted IMO).

Thank you for your help.
Best!