ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Quantitative Psychology and Measurement
This article is part of the Research TopicAdvancing Measurement Validity in Clinical and Dynamic PsychologyView all 12 articles
The ubiquitous sex differences in adolescent mental health: Do we miss pieces of a more complex puzzle?
Provisionally accepted
- 1Forebygging.no, Narvik, Norway
- 2Universitetet i Bergen, Bergen, Norway
- 3Universitetet i Stavanger Laeringsmiljosenteret, Stavanger, Norway
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This study investigates the sex differences in three widely used mental health instruments, the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale and Hopkins Symptom Checklist 5 and 10. The psychometric properties and differential item functioning of the instruments were explored with measurement invariance tests and multiple indicators multiple causes models to more fully inspect potential indicator-level differences leading to bias. There were two adolescent samples in this study. One sample was in grade 8 (ages 13-14; 49% females), and the other was in grade 11 (ages 16-17; 45% females). The results indicate 1) a dissimilar contribution of some indicators to their latent construct across sexes or a mean sex difference in indicators that are not captured by the construct and 2) that several indicators of the instruments might be biased regarding sex. This study contributes to our knowledge of the complexity of sex differences in the measurement of adolescent mental health.
Keywords: adolescence, Mental Health, sex differences, invariance, Multiple indicators multiple causes
Received: 17 Sep 2025; Accepted: 25 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Kristensen and Vestad. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Sara Madeleine Kristensen
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