Chinese College Students Put a New Impulsivity and Compulsivity Checklist to the Test

Impulsivity and compulsivity have long been treated as separate worlds in psychiatry, one associated with acting without thinking and the other with thinking without being able to stop acting. A growing body of research argues that they are better understood as two ends of a single behavioral spectrum, a transdiagnostic dimension that cuts across diagnoses such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, substance use, gambling, and behavioral addictions. The Impulsive-Compulsive Behaviours Checklist, or ICBC, was developed to capture that spectrum directly, asking respondents about concrete behaviors rather than abstract traits. But a questionnaire built in one culture does not automatically travel well to another, and a team of Chinese researchers has now put the scale through one of the most rigorous statistical workouts available in psychometrics.

The study, published in BMC Psychiatry, was led by Wenjia Leng and Jie Fan of the Second Xiangya Hospital of Central South University in Changsha, together with colleagues from Hunan institutions. The researchers recruited 2,397 Chinese college students, a population often used in early validation work because of its accessibility and its elevated rates of emerging behavioral addictions such as problematic internet use. Participants completed the translated ICBC alongside established validation instruments, including the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale, the Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory-Revised, and the Young Internet Addiction Test, allowing the team to check whether the new scale behaved the way a valid measure of impulsivity and compulsivity should.

Before any modeling began, the researchers screened the original 33-item scale using item analysis and exploratory factor analysis. Two items dropped out: exercising and illicit drug use. The first likely lost its discriminating power in a context where regular exercise is common and socially encouraged rather than compulsive, and the second may reflect the comparatively low base rate of illicit drug use among Chinese students. In their place, the team added one culturally relevant item, restraining from food, a behavior that resonates with dietary restriction practices in the Chinese context. The result is a 32-item Chinese version of the checklist, subtly reshaped to fit the behaviors that actually matter in its new setting.

The heart of the study lies in its modeling strategy. Traditional confirmatory factor analysis forces every item to load on exactly one factor and assumes that items measuring the same construct are unrelated to items measuring others, an assumption that is often unrealistic for overlapping constructs like impulsivity and compulsivity. Exploratory structural equation modeling, or ESEM, relaxes that constraint, letting items cross-load on multiple factors. The researchers compared competing structures using both CFA and ESEM, and the clear winner was the most sophisticated option: a bifactor-ESEM model, which simultaneously estimates one broad general factor and several narrow specific factors, each item allowed to speak to all of them.

In the winning model, the behaviors were organized around a single general disinhibition factor flanked by two specific factors with evocative names. The first, labeled impulsive-compulsions, captures compulsive behaviors with an impulsive flavor, such as compulsive shopping or binge-like episodes. The second, compulsive-impulsions, captures impulsive behaviors tinged with compulsion, such as excessive gaming or checking. The distinction sounds like wordplay, but it reflects a genuine insight of the transdiagnostic framework: many real-world behaviors mix both qualities, and forcing them into pure categories distorts the data.

The bifactor indices then revealed how much weight each factor could actually carry. The general disinhibition factor explained 40 percent of the common variance, with high factor determinacy of 0.93 and construct reliability of 0.88, yet its omega hierarchical of 0.55 showed that it contributed only a limited share of reliable variance to total scores. The compulsive-impulsions factor emerged as the strongest specific dimension, with an omega hierarchical subscale of 0.66 and strong reliability indices. The impulsive-compulsions factor, by contrast, offered limited unique reliable information beyond the general factor, with an omega hierarchical subscale of just 0.33, prompting the authors to urge cautious interpretation of scores on that dimension.

These numbers carry a practical warning. In Western samples, the general disinhibition factor of the ICBC has appeared considerably more dominant, and the Chinese findings suggest that the balance between general and specific variance is culturally contingent. The authors conclude that the total score of the Chinese version should not be used at all, and that researchers should instead rely on factor scores from the bifactor-ESEM model, particularly the general disinhibition and compulsive-impulsions dimensions. It is a candid admission that a translated scale can be statistically sound while still diverging in structure from its original, a nuance that often gets lost when questionnaires cross borders.

The scale also passed several conventional tests of quality. Factor scores from the bifactor model showed relatively small but significant correlations with external validation measures, ranging from -0.17 to 0.46, in the directions expected for impulsivity, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, and internet addiction. Test-retest reliability, measured by intraclass correlation coefficients over a repeated administration, ranged from 0.50 to 0.59, modest but not unusual for behavioral checklists whose targets fluctuate week to week. Most importantly for future research, the scale demonstrated configural, metric, scalar, and residual invariance across gender, meaning that men and women respond to the items in comparable ways and group comparisons are statistically legitimate.

Why does this matter beyond the psychometrics laboratory? Behavioral addictions are rising concerns on campuses worldwide, from smartphone overuse to disordered eating, and clinicians increasingly want tools that measure the underlying dimension rather than each diagnosis separately. A validated Chinese ICBC opens the door to cross-cultural studies that can test whether the impulsive-compulsive spectrum is a human universal or a construct shaped by cultural context. The finding that the general factor is weaker in China than in Western samples is itself scientifically interesting, hinting that the ways disinhibition expresses itself may differ across societies, perhaps reflecting differences in how behaviors like exercise, eating, and drug use are embedded in daily life.

The study is not without limitations. It relied on a college sample, so generalization to clinical populations or older adults remains to be demonstrated, and the modest test-retest figures suggest the checklist captures behaviors that are inherently variable. The weak impulsive-compulsions factor will need attention in future revisions, possibly through item refinement or larger samples. Still, the work stands as a model of modern scale validation: a large sample, culturally informed adaptation, and a bifactor-ESEM framework that asks not just whether a scale fits, but which of its scores can be trusted. For researchers studying the tangled roots of impulsive and compulsive behavior in China, the 32-item Chinese ICBC now provides a carefully calibrated instrument, along with an honest map of its strengths and its limits.

Subject of Research: Psychometric validation of the Chinese version of the Impulsive-Compulsive Behaviours Checklist using bifactor exploratory structural equation modeling in college students

Article Title: Psychometric properties of the Chinese version of the Impulsive–Compulsive Behaviours Checklist in Chinese college students: a bifactor exploratory structural equation modeling approach

Article References: Leng, W., Liu, Q., Lei, Y., Zeng, Y., Jiang, Y., Liu, H., Zhu, X., & Fan, J. (2026). Psychometric properties of the Chinese version of the Impulsive–Compulsive Behaviours Checklist in Chinese college students: a bifactor exploratory structural equation modeling approach. BMC Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-026-08720-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12888-026-08720-8

Keywords: impulsivity, compulsivity, disinhibition, bifactor-ESEM, psychometrics, transdiagnostic constructs, ICBC, Chinese college students, behavioral addictions, measurement invariance, cross-cultural validation, BMC Psychiatry