Confirmatory factor analyses of the children’s attitudes and behaviors towards animals scale in two eastern cultural contexts

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the factor stability of the Children’s Attitudes and Behaviors Towards Animals Scale (CABTA) across two eastern contexts: China and Malaysia. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) were conducted on data collected from 700 Chinese mothers and 700 Chinese fathers, and 385 Malay parents of children aged 6–12 years. The CFA results suggested that the model was a good fit for both the Chinese and Malaysian responses. Furthermore, invariance testing showed that although there was factor loading invariance across cultures, the assumption of intercept invariance did not hold. This suggests that although the scale is suitable for use in both cultures, mean comparisons across contexts could be problematic. The internal reliabilities for the Typical and Malicious cruelty subscales were adequate across the samples. All findings show that the CABTA is a promising scale for international use. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2013