PROPIEDADES PSICOMÉTRICAS DE LA ESCALA DE PHUBBING: MODELO BIFACTOR E INVARIANZA FACTORIAL EN UNIVERSITARIOS PERUANOS

Introduction: Phubbing is a behavior that consists in underestimating direct interpersonal communication by giving preference to use the smartphone, due to its disqualifying nature it has negative implications in people's lives. The Phubbing Scale is the most used to measure this attribute, it was designed by Karadag et al. (2015) and has shown to sustain its two-dimensional structure in different contexts. Objective: The present study focuses on analyzing the relevance of a bifactor model that explains the common variance of the specific factors. Likewise, it seeks to verify the invariance of the measure according to gender. Method: For this instrumental study, 632 Lima university students were intentionally selected, mostly from private universities (54.6%), with a higher presence of women (54.1%), their ages range between 16 and 37 years (M=20.88; SD=2.74). Results: The results show that the bifactor model presents a better fit with respect to other models analyzed (TLI=.99; RMSEA=.05 [.03-.06]; ECV=.71; H=.89; FD=.91). Likewise, it was possible to establish the configurational, metric and scalar invariance of the measure according to gender. It is concluded that the Phubbing Scale is a parsimonious and interpretable measure that consistently measures phubbing in Lima university students.