1. Introduction
Anomie is a complex concept [
1] and historically presents a variety of definitions [
2]. Durkheim [
3] developed his theory of social change, which centered on a socially constructed morality [
4,
5] that regulates an individual’s behavior. The theory highlights how the division of labor disconnects the subject from tradition and their ancestors, separating individual judgment from the collective. This greater complexity or overspecialization [
6] causes disorientation in social relationships and stresses morality (doctrines, customs, norms), which for this author is the basis of social integration, and anomie arises sui generis, which would disappear [
5] while the discipline and morality of the new order reappear. Thus understood, anomie can be inserted into the debate on the theory of social regulation [
4], where the control of individual passions occurs through the internalization of a socially constructed morality; however, when these mechanisms fail, a state of “immorality” is produced [
5], the central characteristic of which is that the social regulation apparatus disappears, leaving the subject with no guidance for their behavior. As the concept is often understood, this lack of rules would occur in the transition between an old order and a new one [
7,
8].
This approach opens up various perspectives, highlighting the consequences of the lack of normativity or its ambiguity [
9,
10] at the social and personal levels. For the individual, Freud [
11] mentions a tension resulting from the repression of biological urges due to social coercion, producing a malaise inherent to living in society. Thus, abnormal behaviors could be explained by the triumph of instinct over social repression. Merton [
12] seeks an explanation for abnormal behavior in the social structure and culture rather, than developing a pathological individual version [
5]; hence, he posits that in society, there is a breakdown between social goals, a limited availability of opportunity within a class structure, and an erosion of the admissible means to achieve those goals [
12]. Cultural aspirations, especially in American society, have installed wealth and economic success as the great objectives to be achieved. Exaltation in this goal has caused demoralization and distancing from the means, especially considering that in the social structure, the distribution of opportunities is heterogeneous and benefits the upper socioeconomic strata to a greater extent [
5]. Thus, anomie would occur when the end takes precedence over the legitimate means to achieve it. With Merton [
12], the concept of anomie transitions to a sociology of deviant behavior and crime [
2], an analysis that deepens with the developments of Messner and Rosenfeld [
13], with the theory of institutional anomie [
14].
In line with Durkheim’s initial contributions, the present study understands anomie as the perception that a given society has become disintegrated and deregulated. Disintegration implies a perceived breakdown in the social fabric, including a lack of trust and moral standards. Deregulation involves the perception that a society’s leadership is collapsing, that it is illegitimate and ineffective, and that leaders do not represent them and do not follow fair decision-making processes [
15]. Thus, anomie is an evaluation of the state of society made by a subject (intersubjective construction) through processes of interpretation and social communication that may or may not be influenced by objective processes such as economic crises, wars, or social outbursts, and which may or may not be affected by objective processes such as economic crises, wars, social upheavals, etc. [
15]. This current is separated from studies focused on anomie as a mental state of individuals in an anomic society, the axes of which are deviant behaviors, crime, as well as despair, personal confusion, frustration, meaninglessness, powerlessness, and loneliness [
16,
17,
18,
19,
20].
Current evidence indicates that anomie is directly related to social unrest or social discontent [
15,
21,
22], violent extremism [
23], inequality [
15,
24,
25,
26], moral polarization [
27], social control [
28] and control in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic [
29], greed [
30], as well as higher divorce rates [
31]. At the political level, it was found that the greater the deregulation (a dimension of anomie), the greater the support for proposals pertaining to protectionism and economic redistribution [
32] as well as to prosocial behaviors [
29], and greater support for extreme positions on the right and left [
32]. Additionally, the greater the disintegration (another dimension of anomie), the greater the support for strong conservative/authoritarian style leaders [
24,
25,
27]. There is also evidence that perceived anomie is associated with lower interpersonal trust, which would also be associated with lower political trust [
33]. In turn, there is evidence that perceived anomie affects people’s representations of past events or political figures [
34], and would also influence a negative bias of some decline into the future [
21,
22,
35].
Just as there are many definitions of anomie, there are also multiple instruments for its empirical measurement. Probably the most widely used measure is Srole’s scale [
16], which is an approach that addresses the subjective experiences of people exposed to the social condition of anomie; therefore, the author here calls it anomia to differentiate it from the social [
20]. The original scale has five items for five different dimensions, which present the difficulty of measuring complex theoretical constructs with a single item. Several instruments are based on this measure, such as those of Fischer [
36] and Teevan [
37]. The latter has three dimensions: powerlessness, distrust, and social isolation.
Other scales that assess the construct are Dean’s [
38] normlessness scale, which seeks to measure existential angst and religious relativism [
20], and McClosky and Schaar’s [
18] anomie scale based on nine dichotomous items (agree/disagree) that measure an individual’s state of mind. Elmore’s [
39] anomie scale is also based on Srole’s, but incorporates more items per dimension.
More recently, the Ådnanes scale [
40] has postulated three dimensions: one associated with the psychological and two of a more social nature, one based on normlessness and the other on perceptions of social change. Bjarnason [
20] hypothesized an anomie scale with two dimensions: exteriority and constraint. The former points to experiencing the social world as an objective and predictable reality, while constraint refers to the tension between personal engagement with societal expectations. The scale by Heydari et al. [
41] also has three dimensions: powerlessness, meaninglessness and distrust, and the fetishism of money. Bashir and Bala [
42] developed a 21-item scale grouped into three dimensions: meaninglessness, distrust, and moral decline. In 2021, a scale was developed to measure organizational anomie, consisting of a single dimension and eight items and focusing on employees’ psychosociological perceptions [
43]. Vilca et al. [
44] developed an anomie scale for the pandemic context, defining a behavioral factor that refers to non-compliance with norms and an affective factor that refers to the degree of dissatisfaction generated by the new norms.
Without being an exhaustive review of the large number of instruments available for measuring anomie, it is important to note that most belong to the psychological current related to despair, personal confusion, frustration, meaninglessness, powerlessness, and loneliness [
16,
17,
18,
19,
20], which departs from the initial meaning of the Durkheimian concept, associated with a central discussion on social integration and regulation.
This research uses the Perception of Anomie Scale (PAS) by Teymoori et al. [
15], which comes from social psychology and takes up Durkheim’s [
3] central concepts, the purpose of which is to assess society in relation to intersubjectivity. They build and validate a two-dimensional instrument, concerning breakdown in social fabric and breakdown of leadership. This instrument was applied in 30 countries to obtain convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity through a stepwise study [
15]. Compared with other countries, Chile had an average score of 4.53 on the scale, ranking 13th among the nations with the greatest perception of anomie.
While the fit indicators measured in the original study [
15] present evidence of validity supporting the two-factor correlated structure (RMSEA = 0.06; CFI = 0.96; TLI = 0.95), in addition to satisfactory internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alphas of 0.88 for the entire scale, 0.81 for perceived breakdown in the social fabric, and 0.87 for perceived breakdown of leadership, there is no version adapted to Chile.
Concerning previous instrumental studies, only one study was found that analyzes the psychometric properties of the PAS in Colombian students [
45], although there are some important limitations. First, the reliability analysis was performed before the structural analysis, which indicates that the internal structure was assumed before it was evaluated. Second, the α coefficient was calculated for the complete scale, when its calculation should be done by dimensions, although at this level, breakdown of leadership had more support than breakdown in social fabric. Third, by not establishing a minimum criterion for factor loadings, there are some items whose value is too low to be considered relevant, such as items 5 (λ = 0.44) and 6 (λ = 0.30).
Chile presented high anomie values in 2016; however, in October 2019, a social movement of significant proportions was unleashed, which put Chilean institutionality at risk and involved, among other consequences, the drafting of a new constitution by a majority of left-wing constituents and the election of Gabriel Boric as president.
The pandemic and the process of drafting the new constitution moderated these pressures for change, resulting in the proposal being rejected by a large majority, giving new strength to the extreme right in particular. These pendular movements may be based on the perception of an anomic Chilean society, and therefore, it is necessary to have valid and reliable instruments to measure anomie, which is the purpose of this study.
According to the above, the general objective is to analyze the psychometric properties of the PAS, which is divided into three specific objectives: (i) to evaluate the factor structure of the scale; (ii) to evaluate its reliability; (iii) to evaluate the measurement’s invariance by sex. Three hypotheses emerge from these objectives: (H1) the PAS has a two-factor correlated structure; (H2) the reliability results of the PAS in Chilean university students are adequate; and (H3) the results of the models for men and women fit acceptably, demonstrating measurement invariance by sex.
4. Discussion
This study aimed to evaluate the factor structure, reliability, and measurement invariance of the Perception of Anomie Scale (PAS) in a sample of Chilean university students. First, the scale with the two-factor correlated structure was tested (“Breakdown in social fabric” and “Breakdown of leadership”), following the theoretical model and consistent with previous studies [
15,
24,
27,
32,
33,
34,
35,
45]. However, the model was fitted better in a population of university students from southern Chile by eliminating five items from the original version (3, 4, 7, 8, and 9).
There are several reasons why these items did not perform as expected; perhaps there were problems in understanding the items [
80], or perhaps it was due to the presence of inverse items [
81]. In the dimension “Breakdown in social fabric”, comprising the first six items, only item 3 was written in the positive; in the dimension “Breakdown of leadership”, comprising items 7 to 12, only items 7 and 8 were in the negative, confirming that the items within this dimension that were contrary to the polarity of the majority did not load adequately. Items 4 and 9 were eliminated because they were below the cut-off criterion (<0.5). In addition, the goodness-of-fit indices improved with their elimination. It is important to note that eliminating these items did not affect the theoretical structure of the original construct. The dimension breakdown in social fabric contained items addressing trust (1 and 2) and moral decline (5 and 6); the same was true for the dimension “Breakdown of leadership”, which maintained items on legitimacy (11 and 12) and effectiveness (10). Additionally, while the correlation between factors is relatively low, it can be explained by the combination of methods used (ESEM and factorial simplicity), because this eliminated items that were significantly influenced by more than one factor, and consequently, artificially raised inter-factor correlations. Finally, it is necessary to mention that there are likely other structural reasons (e.g., correlation between residuals) that explain the behavior of the RMSEA in the last model, since it is more sensitive to misspecifications than other indicators [
82] and to sample size [
83].
The study closest to the objectives of this study was conducted in a Colombian university population, where the validity of this scale was reviewed [
45], and items 1 and 12 were eliminated, considering only an internal consistency analysis through Cronbach’s α. Reliability for the dimension “Breakdown of leadership” was adequate; however, it was weak for the dimension “Breakdown in social fabric”, which is consistent with previous studies employing a university population [
15,
45]. While the low reliability reported for the “Breakdown in social fabric” dimension might be concerning, in a basic research context, it could be tolerable, given that its factor loadings are acceptable (>0.50 [
67]), implying an adequate representation of the construct in studies analyzing latent variables. However, it is necessary to cautiously interpret the results of these applications and take actions to optimize the measure. On the other hand, it would not be advisable for use in applied research because it is typically focused on decision-making about individuals.
The factorial invariance of the PAS as a function of sex was examined. The results show that the PAS measured men and women equivalently. This included factor loadings (weak invariance), thresholds (strong invariance), and residuals (strict invariance). These findings are relevant because we were able to compare the means between men and women. In that regard, after conducting that procedure, no significant differences were found between these groups, a finding that aligns with the study by Teymoori et al. [
15], who made comparisons of means between men and women and found no significant differences, although without performing a previous analysis that would enable an equitable comparison. The evidence indicates that the Chilean sociopolitical context and recent events such as the political and economic crisis, and the pandemic outbreak, cause anomie to be perceived equally by both men and women.
In relation to the conceptual contributions of this study, as noted, there are two main currents in the study of anomie. One is linked to more psychological aspects, related to mental processes of people living in an anomic society, a line that addresses, among others, deviant behaviors, crime, despair, personal confusion, frustration, meaninglessness, powerlessness, and loneliness [
16,
17,
18,
19,
20]. The other is the more social current, to which this study subscribes, linked to the initial developments made by Durkheim [
3] on social integration and regulation, but which in the current discussion incorporates elements of intersubjectivity to assess society [
15]. This approach makes it possible to see anomie as a social construct that may or may not be influenced by objective events a community or country experiences [
15]. Perhaps more importantly, however, this intersubjective construction of society influences key aspects of today’s society. For example, at the psychological level, it may help to explain mental health issues [
84]; at the social level, it may be a key variable in understanding social discontent [
21,
22], social mobilizations, and violent extremism [
23]. At the economic level, there is evidence of its close relationship with inequality [
24,
26], and at the political level it could help explain the political fragmentation and pendulum-swings to the extremes [
24,
26,
27,
32].
The Perception of Anomie Scale provides a valuable measure of the state of Chilean society through the lens of university students who have always pushed for social demands [
85]. In applying the original study, Chile averaged 4.53 on the PAS, ranking 13th out of 28 countries with more anomie; in this study, the average increased to 4.6. There is a perception among university students that the country is anomic [
86], and this could explain the mental health problems [
87], the demands for greater equality that occurred during the social outburst of October 2019, and the political fragmentation and growing polarization of Chilean society today. Certainly, the Chilean social context has influenced the increase in the anomie perception. This statement aligns with Teymoori et al. [
15], who indicated that most stable countries have a lower perception of anomie, while those experiencing economic crises, social changes and internal conflicts show a higher perception of anomie.
One of the study’s main limitations is related to the representativeness of the sample. Only students from universities located in Temuco participated, mainly from the Araucanía region, a territory that represents about 6% of the national population. Furthermore, there was an insufficient number of individuals who identified themselves as non-binary to establish differences in the latent structure of anomie. In the future, it will be necessary to work with probability samples representing other age groups and cities. Likewise, it could be useful to conduct a more thorough review of the contents of items in the factors that present lower reliability coefficients to detect those aspects that can be improved, whether in relation to the evaluated construct or the wording of the item. In addition, evidence of metric invariance should be provided for different subgroups, such as indigenous populations, socioeconomic strata, and political tendencies, as well as a validity analysis for their relationship with other theoretically relevant variables.