Factorial invariance in multilevel confirmatory factor analysis

This paper presents a procedure to test factorial invariance in multilevel confirmatory factor analysis. When the group membership is at level 2, multilevel factorial invariance can be tested by a simple extension of the standard procedure. However level-1 group membership raises problems which cannot be appropriately handled by the standard procedure, because the dependency between members of different level-1 groups is not appropriately taken into account. The procedure presented in this article provides a solution to this problem. This paper also shows Muthén's maximum likelihood (MUML) estimation for testing multilevel factorial invariance across level-1 groups as a viable alternative to maximum likelihood estimation. Testing multilevel factorial invariance across level-2 groups and testing multilevel factorial invariance across level-1 groups are illustrated using empirical examples. SAS macro and Mplus syntax are provided.