Exploring the factor structure of a Chinese version of the CORE-OM: insights from network approach and bifactor modeling

ABSTRACT

Objective

The Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation (CORE-OM) is a measure of clinical outcomes that has been widely used in mental health research. Nevertheless, the exploration of the factor structure of the CORE-OM yields diverse results. This study aims to explore the factor structure with an innovative method known as exploratory graph analysis (EGA) and supplemented with bifactor modeling.

Method

A Chinese version of the CORE-OM was administrated to a total of 1361 clinical college students. We first examined the factor structure of the CORE-OM using EGA, and then compared the model derived by EGA with other models using CFA to find the most reasonable model.

Results

The result of EGA indicated a four-factor model of CORE-OM. The CFA further suggested a bifactor model with a four-factor structure combined with a general factor. The bifactor modeling suggested a significant proportion of shared variance among the variables was attributed to the general factor. The four-factor bifactor model exhibited a satisfactory fit to the data.

Conclusion

The results confirm the robustness and parsimonious nature of a four-factor bifactor model for the Chinese version of CORE-OM. It is suitable for measuring intrapersonal psychological distress, positive emotions, interpersonal problems, and risk-related issues among the Chinese population.

Keywords:

• CORE-OM
• counseling outcome
• exploratory graph analysis
• bifactor model

Acknowledgement

We would like to express our gratitude to Dr. Christensen for his invaluable assistance with our queries regarding the EGAnet package.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Declaration of Interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Supplemental Data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/10503307.2024.2344829.

Additional information

Funding

This work was in part supported by “Master Teacher Workshop” Project for Mental Health Education in Colleges and Universities in Jiangsu Province [grant number 2022-15], the Foundation of Humanities and Social Sciences, Ministry of Education of the PRC [grant number 20YJA190004], China Scholarship Council [grant number 202306190090], and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [grant number 010914380003].