Dimensionality of the Chinese Perceived Causes of Poverty Scale: Findings Based on Confirmatory Factor Analyses

The Chinese Perceived Causes of Poverty Scale (CPCPS) was constructed to assess Chinese people’s beliefs about poverty. Four categories of explanations of poverty are covered in this scale: personal problems of poor people, lack of opportunities to escape from poverty, exploitation of poor people, and bad fate. Based on the responses of 1,519 Chinese secondary school students to the CPCPS, confirmatory factor analyses provided support for these four dimensions of the scale. By splitting the total sample into two sub-samples, further analyses showed that the CPCPS was invariant with reference to factor structure (configural invariance), factor loadings (construct-level metric covariance) and factor variances/covariances across different samples. The present findings are generally consistent with the previous findings based on exploratory factor analyses and they provide support for the use of the CPCPS for assessing beliefs about causes of poverty in Chinese people.