A PSYCHOMETRIC INVESTIGATION OF THE FAMILY EMPOWERMENT SCALE

Abstract

Since the advent of the consumer movement roughly 30 years ago, professionals across helping disciplines have lauded empowerment as a critical piece to effective consumer-centered services. Within youth mental health in particular, quality improvement initiatives and flagship service models have been effortfully built with empowerment as a core tenet. Notably, these clinical efforts largely outpaced any consensus on how to clearly define or measure empowerment, and consequently, empirical investigation of empowerment’s relationships to service engagement, processes, and outcomes is relatively underdeveloped. Koren and colleagues’ Family Empowerment Scale (FES; 1992) is the first general empowerment measure ever created and remains the primary instrument for assessing caregivers’ empowerment in the context of their seeking supports for children with emotional disabilities; however, questions about its structure, scoring, and performance, particularly with ethnic minority caregivers, remain unresolved even decades after its conception. The current study therefore examined the FES’ factor structure, reliability, and validity as applied to a community sample of 354 ethnically diverse caregivers from Hawaiʻi. Although the competing four-factor, three-factor, and three-factor bifactor models were all identified to provide an acceptable fit to this sample’s data, the three-factor bifactor model yielded the best fit indices. Furthermore, omega hierarchical estimates indicated the majority of FES response variance was attributable to participants’ differences on a general empowerment factor (as opposed to empowerment within the family, service system, or community/political subdomains). The identified FES General scale and three subscales’ reliabilities all fell in the excellent range. Regarding convergent validity, all FES scales showed promising associations with purported determinants of treatment-seeking behavior, including Help-Seeking Intentions, Knowledge, and Perceived Behavioral Control; however, more unexpected patterns emerged between the FES Community/Political scale and scales measuring Help-Seeking Attitudes and Perceived Treatment Barriers. Overall results contribute to the FES psychometric literature by furthering evidence of its potential bifactor structure, highlighting its applicability to Asian and Pacific Islander caregivers, and replicating observed relationships with other variables associated with mental health service uptake.