198 The Inner Wealth Inventory (IWI) is a screening tool for measuring inner wealth (IW), a wellness-based construct centered on empowering clients to inherently value themselves for being who they are. The initial IWI score validation study was conducted with samples of child welfare professionals. If the IWI’s psychometric properties are confirmed with a normative sample of U.S. adults, it has potential to offer professional counselors a tool for measuring IW. The purpose of the present study was to test the factorial invariance and convergent validity evidence of scores on the IWI with a national sample (N = 840) of U.S. adults, stratified by the census data for gender, ethnoracial identity, geographic location, and age. The results of factorial invariance and convergent validity testing revealed strong support for the psychometric properties of a sample of U.S. adults’ scores on the unidimensional IWI, including equivalence in the meaning of IW across gender, ethnoracial identity, help-seeking history, education, and income in our sample. Keywords: Inner Wealth Inventory, professional counselors, U.S. adults, psychometric properties, equivalence Promoting wellness with an emphasis on development and prevention is a core focus in the discipline of professional counseling (Long et al., 2022; Myers, 1992; Myers & Sweeney, 2014). Measuring and promoting wellness is an especially important issue when considering the ubiquitous and comorbid nature of mental and physical health issues among adults living in the United States (World Health Organization [WHO], n.d., 2021). Wellness-based screening tools with rigorously validated scores have a lot of utility in professional counseling settings for monitoring clients’ health and wellness (Mason et al., 2023). Consistent with the wellness orientation of the counseling profession, The Inner Wealth Inventory (IWI) is a wellness-based screening tool for measuring inner wealth, which is defined as: A growing, accruing, and deepening sense of internal enrichment, which can be enhanced by external or internal self-narrated recognitions, that empowers a person to navigate the world in relation to one’s unfolding of who they really are as a person who is meaningful, valued, and who has great things to contribute by being simply true to oneself. (Bennett et al., 2023, p. 123) The initial IWI score validation study was conducted with two large samples of child welfare professionals (Bennett et al., 2023). The psychometric properties of screening tools can fluctuate over time or with different normative samples (American Educational Research Association [AERA] et al., 2014). Professional counselors have an ethical duty to make sure that screening tools have valid and reliable scores with untested samples to confirm that they are used properly (Lenz et al., 2022; National Board for Certified Counselors, 2023). Accordingly, the primary aim of the present investigation was to test the The Professional Counselor™ Volume 14, Issue 2, Pages 198–211 http://tpcjournal.nbcc.org © 2024 NBCC, Inc. and Affiliates doi: 10.15241/mtk.14.2.198 Michael T. Kalkbrenner, Stephanie L. Zackery, Yuxuan Zhao Factorial Invariance of Scores on the Inner Wealth Inventory: A Nationwide Sample of Adults in the United States Michael T. Kalkbrenner, PhD, NCC, is a full professor at New Mexico State University. Stephanie L. Zackery is a doctoral student at New Mexico State University. Yuxuan Zhao, MEd, is a doctoral candidate at New Mexico State University. Correspondence may be addressed to Michael T. Kalkbrenner, Department of Counseling and Educational Psychology, New Mexico State University, 1780 E. University Ave., Las Cruces, NM 88003, mkalk001@nmsu.edu.
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