著者

宮野 勝

出版者

中央大学社会科学研究所

雑誌

中央大学社会科学研究所年報 (ISSN:13432125)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.23, pp.1-21, 2019-09-30

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We examined which gender has more political interest in Japan through MGCFA (Multigroup Confirmatory Factor Analysis). Our observed variables are six items of political interest from our Web survey in February 2015. They are self-evaluation of political interest, three types of media use (TV, newspaper, and internet) / people (family and friends). All six items positively correlate with others and the Cronbach’s alpha is 0.772. This relation is similar in each gender. However, among items the female means are lower in four, higher in one than male’s and about the same in one. This peculiarity makes the signs of correlation between gender and each item different across items. As we can expect from the peculiar correlations, when we adapted group meanstructure model of one factor MGCFA, both the configural model and metric model fit sufficiently and Scalar Invariance model does not. Then we estimated Partial Invariance models. Models fixing one of intercepts of six items fit adequately. The four-items model by dropping two peculiar items also fits well. The difference in means between female and male depends on models. Since we do not have particular standards to fix one of the intercepts or to drop items, we did not find a persuasive way to choose one model. We conclude that the concept of political interest has some complexity and we cannot be too cautious in constructing and selecting Partial Invariance models of MGCFA.