Cultural Perspective on the Aging Semantic Differential: Attitudes towards Older Adults among College Students in China

The Aging Semantic Differential (ASD) is the most widely utilized instrument to measure attitudes towards older adults within the United States. My objective was to translate it to Chinese and examine its validity. Self-administrated anonymous questionnaires were distributed to a convenience sample (N = 380) of Chinese college students. In a confirmatory factor analyses (CFA), all items significantly loaded onto their hypothesized factors, and goodness of fit statistics revealed good fit. While Rosencranz’s “personal acceptability” category overlapped well with my first factor, the items from his “instrumental-ineffective” and “autonomous-dependent” categories were divided primarily between my last two factors. A second CFA was conducted using Rosencraz’s three factors. Comparison of the two CFAs revealed that my model fit the ASD data in China significantly better (Δ df = 87, Δχ2 = 577.2, p \u3c .001). In conclusion, it is possible to use the ASD to assess young adults’ attitudes in China