Measuring Cultural Engagement Among Urban American Indian Parents: A Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Cross-Group Measurement Invariance Study

Background and Purpose: Cultural engagement is widely recognized by both researchers and Indigenous communities as a core protective resource for urban American Indian families. Rooted in Tribal cosmologies and affirmed by Indigenous well-being scholarship, culture is understood as a source of identity, healing, and collective resilience that sustains families across generations. Yet quantitative research has rarely subjected measures of cultural engagement to rigorous structural validation or examined whether measurement properties hold equivalently among individuals with different cultural upbringings and lived experiences. This study addresses that gap by validating cultural engagement as a latent construct and testing its measurement equivalence between urban American Indian parents raised on versus off a reservation.

Methods: Baseline survey data from 578 parents of American Indian children aged 10–17 enrolled in a culturally grounded parenting intervention across three Arizona cities were analyzed. Participants were predominantly female (76.9%) with a mean age of 36.7 years and represented 37 Tribal backgrounds. More than half (54.0%) reported spending most of their childhood on a reservation. Cultural engagement was modeled as a latent factor with six indicators: American Indian ethnic identity attachment and exploration, following the American Indian way of life, cultural practices participation, American Indian language use, and American Indian spirituality and beliefs. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) using Mplus 8.10 tested a one-factor model. Sequential measurement invariance testing (configural, metric, and scalar) compared parents raised as children on Tribal reservations versus those raised off reservation.

Results: The one-factor CFA model with a residual correlation between the two ethnic identity subscales demonstrated adequate fit (CFI = .985, RMSEA = .064, SRMR = .024). Following the American Indian way of life (β = .821) and American Indian spirituality and beliefs (β = .801) were the strongest indicators, affirming that cultural engagement among urban parents is anchored in collective lifeways and traditional values. American Indian language use (β = .455) and cultural practices (β = .433) showed weaker but acceptable loadings, reflecting structural barriers to full cultural expression in urban settings. Invariance testing showed that the factor structure and relative strength of item loadings were equivalent for those raised on versus off reservations. However, parents raised on reservations reported uniformly higher mean scores across all six indicators.

Conclusions and Implications: Cultural engagement functions as a coherent latent construct among urban American Indian parents, with traditional lifeways and spirituality as its anchoring dimensions. For social work, establishing valid and equivalent measurement is a prerequisite for building evidence-based, culturally grounded interventions that justify resource allocation and support advocacy for Indigenous families in urban settings. Metric invariance supports cross-group structural analyses, while the absence of scalar invariance means direct latent mean comparisons require caution. These findings provide a validated measurement foundation for future research on Indigenous well-being and highlight variability in cultural engagement across urban Indigenous communities. Urban upbringings pose barriers to learning and practicing Tribal languages, underscoring the need for urban Indian centers to actively support access to language, ceremony, and community resources as critical pathways to fuller cultural engagement and Indigenous well-being.