Longitudinal Dynamics of Mattering Constructs in Chinese Adolescents: Gender Differences in Patterns of Stability and Change
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The longitudinal dynamics of mattering, including measurement invariance across time and patterns of stability versus change within individuals, remain largely unexplored. This study investigated these properties for three mattering dimensions (general mattering, anti-mattering, and fear of not-mattering) among Chinese adolescents across different contexts, assessing their psychometric validity, test-retest reliability, developmental trajectories, and gender-specific patterns. The General Mattering Scale, Anti-Mattering Scale, and Fear of Not-Mattering Inventory were administered (N = 645; Mage = 17.02, SD = 0.63; 49.6% female) at three time points over a 5-month period. Longitudinal measurement invariance was assessed using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). Temporal stability was evaluated through test-retest reliability. Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) examined intraindividual changes. Gender differences were tested using gender-stratified CFAs, stability analyses, and trajectory models. As result, the longitudinal measurement invariance was supported for all three scales across time points and genders. Test-retest reliability showed moderate-to-good stability, with females consistently higher than males. HLM revealed linear increases in general mattering for both genders, but only females showed significant anti-mattering changes, peaking at school reentry. Fear of not mattering remained stable for both genders. Findings reveal gender-specific mattering dynamics: females showed higher stability with synchronized responses to transitions, whereas males displayed lower stability and more idiosyncratic fluctuations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".