A Confirmatory Factor-Analytic Model of Alienation

This paper presents a longitudinal second-order confirmatory factor-analytic model of alienation in employed U.S. men, based on Seeman's original five-facet conceptualization. Alienation appears in this model as a second-order factor that is significantly related to all five of these facets. Powerlessness and self-estrangement are shown to be the two central facets. Meaninglessness, normlessness and cultural estrangement show progressively smaller relationships to the underlying alienation construct. Although cultural estrangement is significantly related to the underlying construct, removing it results in a model that fits the data slightly better. Cross-national comparisons using cross-sectional data from Poland and Japan confirm the generalizability of this model. However, the magnitudes of the relationships of both normlessness and cultural estrangement to the second-order factor are somewhat different for Japan than for the United States and Poland.