Measurement Invariance of the Adult Self-Report Across Sex and Ethnoracial Status in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study

Understanding sex and ethnoracial group differences in psychopathology is critical to identify mental health disparities. However, the validity of these group differences is often uninterrogated. One threat to validity is measurement bias, where specific items may be more likely to be endorsed by a specific group even without differences in underlying psychopathology. We examined measurement bias using invariance testing in the Adult Self-Report (ASR) in adult parents of children in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study ( N = 8,608). The ASR dimensions demonstrated invariance across sex and ethnoracial groupings, except for Antagonism and Social Maladjustment. These results suggest that some dimensions of the ASR are largely invariant across sex and ethnoracial groupings in this sample, and that group differences in measured scores are likely unconfounded by measurement bias. We report sex and ethnoracial group differences in psychopathology dimensions and discuss limitations of parental psychopathology assessment in the ABCD study.