Examining Measurement Invariance of the Planning for Career and Family Scale (PLAN) Across Race/Ethnicity, Gender, and College Year Among Engineering College Students.

This article focuses on examining the measurement invariance (MI) of the Planning for Career and Family Scale (PLAN), a tool originally developed to assess women college students' willingness to consider future children and partners in career planning, within a diverse sample of 1,454 U.S. engineering students. Through confirmatory factor analysis, the PLAN scale was refined from 24 to 21 items with a bifactor structure found to best fit the data, capturing a general factor and two subdomains: planning for children and planning for a partner. MI testing using two methods yielded mixed results, with scalar invariance supported only across academic years, indicating that comparisons of PLAN scores across gender, race/ethnicity, and their intersection should be made cautiously. Latent mean comparisons revealed that senior students reported a higher willingness to plan for family in career decisions than sophomores, highlighting developmental changes during college. The study underscores the PLAN scale's potential utility in informing tailored educational and counseling interventions in engineering education while calling for further methodological refinement and adaptation of the scale for diverse populations.