Exploratory Factor Analysis of Youth Problem Inventory in India and China

India and China have the largest population of youth in the world. However, on the other hand, there is equivalent proportion of mental health issues being reported with the youth as this is a transition stage to adulthood when significant life events occur and decisions are made. Due to cultural differences prevalent in both the countries, it was deemed essential to establish the factor structure of the Youth Inventory Scale (Verma, 2004). It is a self-administered inventory to identify the problems that youth face in areas of family, school/ college, social settings and personal life. A total of 411 Indian youth (M = 182; F = 229) with M_Age = 20.88 and 204 Chinese Youth (Males = 67; Females = 137) with M_Age = 25.19 participated voluntarily in the study. The items were screened for missing values, minimum, maximum, skewness and kurtosis. Since the missing values were below 5% and random in nature the missing values were replaced with item mean. EFA was computed with PCA and Varimax rotation and with Maximum Likelihood and Promax rotation to ensure robustness of the evolving factor structures. The results of the exploratory factor analysis for both the countries were different. EFA for Indian youth revealed 53 items, 4-factor solution with 45.90% of variance with Eigen value = 3.81 and KMO-SA of .89 whereas EFA for Chinese youth revealed 60 items, 4-factor solution with 46.81% of variance with Eigen value = 3.88 and KMO-SA of .88. The results indicate that there is a difference between Indian and Chinese youth. A future study needs to be undertaken to establish the construct validity of the measure.

Key Words: Youth, Problems, India, China, Exploratory Factor Analysis