Factorial invariance according to sex of the How I Think Questionnaire in Peruvian adolescents

Since the consolidation of the cognitive psychology and its diffusion around the world, the cognitions have taken a place of great rele-vance in order to explain a large variety of psychological events and phenomena. Nowa-days the cognitive psychology is the dominant paradigm in the wide world of psychology, including obviously the Ibero-american coun-tries. One construct that had been used in the field of clinical and forensic psychology is related to cognitive distortions, which have predictive power over the violent and aggres-sive behavior in children, adolescents, and adult people (Pella & Andreu, 2012). The cognitive distortions can be defined as a kind of negative and irrational cognitions (Ellis, 1999) that are used to explain or justify the aggressive behavior, and they are also linked to delinquent behavior (Roncero et al., 2016). Cognitive distortions can be classified in two types: self-serving and self-debasing cogni-tive distortions. In the first case, there are four types of self-serving cognitive distortions: Self-centered, Blaming others, Minimizing/ Mislabeling, and Assuming the worst. In the second case, there are also four self-debasing cognitive distortions: Catastrophizing, Over -generalizing, Personalizing, and Selective abstraction. Both types have great influence in people's beliefs, emotions, attitudes, and behaviors (Barriga et al., 2008). Several instru-ments have been applied to measure cognitive distortions. Some of them are orientated to measure the self-serving cognitive distortions and some others are orientated to measure the self-debasing type, such as The Cogni-tive Errors Questionnaire or The Automatic Thoughts Questionnaire. One of the most used tests to assess the self-serving cognitive distor-tions is the How I Think Questionnaire, that has been validated in Spanish-speaking popu-lation such as Spain, with adequate goodness of fit indexes and reliability; but there is not a validated version in Peru (Rojas et al., 2019). The present research pretends to analyze the psychometrical properties of the How I Think Questionnaire, a mental test that measures the cognitive distortions. Following that aim, this instrument was applied in a sample of adoles-cents from Arequipa (Peru), comprised of 2 803 middle and upper High School students (48.9 % female and 51.1 % male) between 13 and 19 years old. The version used of the How I Think Questionnaire was the one developed and validated by Barriga and Gibbs (1996), which has 54 items with five levels of Likert's scale response. The psychometrical process implies the analysis of validity by confirma-tory factor analysis, reliability by the internal consistency method, and factorial invariance according to the sex of the adolescents that participated in the sample. The psychomet-rical results indicate that the How I Think Questionnaire possesses construct validity with three factors: Blaming others/Assuming the worst (which contains two factors from the original version), Minimizing and Self -Cen-tered. It also has adequate reliability indexes, estimated by McDonald's Omega Test, and there are no trends to male or female scores according to the factorial invariance applied, taking sex as a comparison criterion. It is concluded that the How I Think Questionnaire is a valid and reliable instrument to assess Peruvian adolescents who live in Arequipa, although it presents some variations compared to its original structure. And the How I Think Questionnaire can be applied in male and female adolescents from Arequipa without the risk of biased scores. However, it is recom-mendable to perform new psychometric studies that include adolescent's samples from all of Peru to obtain a standardized version for the Peruvian population that could be used in several fields of psychological work. The version presented in this research is a useful instrument to assess cognitive distortions in educational, social, and forensic psychology, by mental health specialists in Arequipa Metropolitan City.