Equivalence Testing of the Revised Homework Management Scale (hms-21) in the Indian Context: A Cross Cultural Validation Study

The Homework Management Scale by Xu (2008) was validated in the Indian context by administering it on 743 secondary school students (417 Girls and 326 Boys) of Punjab State of India. All 22 items were found to load on their respective factors, five in number during Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) conducted using SPSS AMOS Ver. 23.0. The CMIN/DF = 1.894, SRMR = 0.0445, TLI=0.942, CFI = 0.950 and RMSEA=0.035 were obtained on co-varying the error terms of the Item 16 and Item17. Equivalence Testing revealed T-size RMSEA and CFI to be 0.04 and 0.925 respectively, implying the population CFI to be above 0.925 with 95 percent confidence and the misspecification not to be more than 0.04. The cut off value of RMSEA found the T-size to be close, while its CFI counterpart was fair in nature. The Bayesian reliability analysis was conducted to compare and contrast the frequentist and Bayesian reliability estimates of the dimensions of Homework Management Scale, and the reliability was found to be satisfactory, with Bayesian Omega ranging from 0.656 to 0.706, for all the five dimensions with 95 percent Bayesian credible interval, using Bayesrel package of R/RStudio. Differential Item Functioning (DIF) of the 22 items with respect gender revealed that the items of the four factors display the characteristics S shape, or measurement invariance, except the items of the factor Distraction. However, item 11 was removed to improve the psychometrics of the scale and the revised HMS-21 has moderate to close equivalence testing results associated with it. Implications of the study are discussed.