Acceptance and Action Questionnaire II: Measurement invariance and associations with distress tolerance among an ethnically diverse university sample

The Acceptance and Action Questionnaire (AAQ-II) is a self-report measure proposed to assess psychological inflexibility and experiential avoidance. Empirical evidence for the measurement invariance of the scale across ethnically diverse populations as well as associations with the theoretically relevant construct of distress tolerance are scarce. This study examined factorial invariance of the AAQ-II across sex and racial/ethnic groups of university students (N = 538). It also examined the relationships between psychological inflexibility/experiential avoidance and distress tolerance, as measured by the AAQ-II and the Distress Tolerance Scale, respectively. The AAQ-II demonstrated strong factorial invariance across sex and race/ethnicity, and it displayed significant associations with distress tolerance. Findings support the unidimensional nature of AAQ-II and suggest that this self-report instrument functions equivalently across subgroups based on sex and race/ethnicity.