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The Feminist Identity Composite: An Examination of Structural Validity With Sexual Minority Women

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Psychology of Women Quarterly

Published online on

Abstract

The Feminist Identity Composite is a commonly used measure of feminist identity development. However, psychometric examinations of this measure with samples of diverse women are lacking. The current study presents the first investigation, to our knowledge, to examine the factor structure of the Feminist Identity Composite with two subsamples of sexual minority women (N = 402). We used exploratory factor analysis (EFA), partial confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and CFA and found both the EFA and subsequent partial CFA (n = 201) indicated a six-factor solution, which was upheld in the final CFA (n = 201). The results generally corroborated four (Passive Acceptance, Embeddedness/Emanation, Synthesis, Active Commitment) of the five original subscales reported in previous studies with predominately heterosexual (or sexual orientation not reported) undergraduate women. However, the subscale Revelation was further delineated into two subscales labeled Societal Revelation and Contact Revelation. Convergent validity of the obtained Feminist Identity Composite subscale scores was largely supported by correlations in expected directions with measures of perceived sexism and heterosexism. We encourage future researchers to investigate the structural and convergent validity of the Feminist Identity Composite with other diverse samples of women.