Two studies of Puerto Rican youths' development on the U.S. mainland examined the consequences of perceived racial/ethnic discrimination on mental health. In Study I, children were found to have a low likelihood of perceiving discrimination, whereas in Study 2, nearly half of the adolescent sample reported perceiving racial/ethnic discrimination. Although both groups scored high on multiple indicators of mental health, perceiving discrimination and worrying about discrimination were negatively associated with some dimensions of self-esteem and positively associated with depression and stress. Adolescents were aware of negative stereotypes about Puerto Ricans, and nearly half of them related discriminatory instances. Results suggest that both perceiving discrimination and anxiety regarding discrimination can serve as risk factors for the mental health of this population.

Most instruments designed to measure acculturation have relied on specific cultural behaviors and preferences as primary indicators of acculturation. In contrast, feelings of belonging and emotional attachment to cultural communities have not been widely used. The Psychological Acculturation Scale (PAS) was developed to assess acculturation from a phenomenological perspective, with items pertaining to the individual's sense of psychological attachment to and belonging within the Anglo-American and Latino/Hispanic cultures. Responses from samples of bilingual individuals and Puerto Rican adolescents and adults are used to establish a high degree of measurement equivalence across the Spanish and English versions of the scale along with high levels of internal consistency and construct validity. The usefulness of the PAS and the importance of studying acculturation from a phenomenological perspective are discussed.Psychological acculturation refers to changes in individuals' psychocultural orientations that develop through involvement and interaction within new cultural systems. Rather than conceptualizing acculturation as a process in which people lose connection to their original culture (Gordon, 1978), new research has emphasized the individual's negotiation of two cultural entities (Berry, Poortinga, Segall, & Dasen, 1992;Buriel, 1993). Responding to distinct sets of norms from the culture of origin and the host culture, acculturating individuals emerge with their own interpretation of appropriate values, customs, and practices as they negotiate between cultural contexts (Berry, 1980). People vary greatly in their abilities to function within new cultural environments (LaFromboise, Coleman, & Gerton, 1993) and may seek different levels of attachment to and involvement in a host culture or their culture(s) of origin (Padilla, 1980).To study individuals' cultural orientations, measures of acculturation traditionally have focused on individuals' behaviors and behavioral preferences and have relied heavily on language use and other behaviors as indicators of acculturation (Marin, Sabogal, VanOss Correspondence concerning this article and requests for copies of the Psychological Acculturation Scale should be addressed to Linda R. Tropp, Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA 95064. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptEduc Psychol Meas. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2011 March 15. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author ManuscriptMarin, Otero-Sabogal, & Perez-Stable, 1987;Szapocznik, Kurtines, & Fernandez, 1980). For example, described acculturation as based in two primary dimensions: cultural behaviors and values. Paralleling their conceptualization of acculturation, the Behavioral Acculturation Scale (Szapocznik, Scopetta, Kurtines, & Aranalde, 1978) includes items most closely related to cultural behaviors and preferences (e.g., "What language do you speak at home?" and "What language do you prefer to speak?").Similarly, Cuellar, Harr...

The dual-focus approach to creating bilingual research protocols requires a bilingual/bicultural research team, including indigenous researchers from the cultures being studied. The presence of indigenous researchers as full and equal members of the research team can guard against an unexamined exportation of ideas and methods developed in one culture to other cultural/linguistic communities. The team develops the research plan and a research protocol that express a given concept with equal clarity, affect, and level of usage simultaneously in two languages. The dualfocus method employs a concept-driven rather than a translation-driven approach to attain conceptual and linguistic equivalence. Examples of the application of this approach to creating new measures in Spanish and English, adapting existing measures, revising instructions to research participants, and correcting official translations are provided.Intercultural research is expanding and bringing with it a host of ethical and substantive concerns. An ethical concern arises when researchers from one culture or dominant group impose their vision of the proper focus of research and its methods on other cultures or among cultural/linguistic minorities in their own country. Gergen, Gulerce, Lock, and Misra (1996) warn that when Western concepts and methods guide research, as is often the case, the resulting product can be of little relevance to other cultures and has the potential to disregard and undermine alternate cultural traditions. Substantive problems can occur due to an unexamined transfer of concepts from one culture/language system to another and/or lack of equivalence in words used to express concepts in the two languages due to differences in affect, familiarity, and clarity. These can introduce serious biases into intercultural research, compromising the scientific integrity of the results. Any differences obtained using research protocols developed in one culture/language system and directly translated into another cannot simply be attributed to cultural differences because they could be, wholly or partly, an artifact of the nonequivalence of the two language versions of the protocol. What is needed is a method for creating research protocols that are constructed with an understanding of and respect for cultures being studied and have conceptual and linguistic equivalence in each language.

This study examines self-esteem as a multidimensional construct in 1 Latino subgroup, Puerto Rican girls and boys during early adolescence, using Harter's (1985b) Self-Perception Profile for Children. The results show that in its English and Spanish versions-the latter developed by the present research team-the Self-Perception Profile for Children has adequate reliability for use with 13-to 14-year-old Puerto Rican youth living on the mainland. Results obtained in this study of Puerto Rican early adolescents, which contrasts with the results from the combined data of "Hispanics" in the American Association of University Women (1991) survey of 3,000 youth, strongly suggests that Latino subgroups need to be studied separately. The mean levels of selfesteem found among Puerto Rican girls and boys were generally similar to those found among Harter's sample of predominantly Anglo middle school students from the suburbs of Denver except that Puerto Rican youth did not show gender differences in overall self-esteem. Gender differences in mean levels of self-esteem in different domains were similar to those of Anglo youth, regardless of the Puerto Rican youth's individual level of psychological or behavioral acculturation. When differences by acculturation emerged, psychological acculturation appeared to play a more protective role for girls (Hispanic-or Latino-oriented girls reported being better behaved and having greater confidence in their scholastic abilities) and behavioral acculturation operated as a risk factor for boys (boys with preference for English reported low Behavioral Conduct and Scholastic Competence scores). On the other hand, greater acculturation (both psychological and behavioral) was associated with girls' lower confidence in their physical attractiveness. Finally, the structure of self-esteem varied by gender, and psychological and behavioral acculturation.There has been much academic and popular interest in gender differences in self-esteem among middle-school-age adolescents (see American Association of University Women [AAUW], 1991;Gilligan, Lyons, & Hanmer, 1990;Orenstein, 1994;Phillips & Zimmerman, 1990;Pipher, 1994). Although some research has indicated that both boys and girls maintain their self-esteem during the adolescent years (Hirsch & Dubois, 1991;Marsh & Gouvernet, 1989), other studies have found that many girls' self-regard declines beginning in early adolescence (AAUW, 1991;Brown & Gilligan, 1992;Gilligan et al., 1990;Phillips & Zimmerman, 1990). In this article, we examine patterns in levels of self- NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript esteem among mainland Puerto Rican girls and boys during early adolescence, using the multidimensional approach to measuring self-esteem developed by Harter (1985b). We compare the findings from our sample of 13-to 14-year-old Puerto Rican youth from the greater Boston area with Harter's primarily Anglo, eighth-grade sample from the Denver suburbs. Additionally, we investigate whether acculturation, as...

The Color of My Skin is an instrument developed to assess children's internalized idea (abstraction) of the color of their skin; their satisfaction with that color; the desire, if any, to change the color of their skin; and their affect regarding their skin color. The assessment is part of a questionnaire utilized in a 3-year longitudinal study that examines psychosocial development, physical health, and behavioral adjustment of Puerto Rican children (N = 257) reared in the Greater Boston area. The results demonstrate that children's internalized representation of their skin color is a construct that can be reliably and validly measured. The children's ratings of their skin color were not associated with their sex, school grade, ethnic identity, the child's or the parent's nativity, or the racial or ethnic compositions of 3 social contexts: their neighborhood, their classmates, and their closest friends. Puerto Rican children did not show a preference for light-colored skin. Moreover, there were no significant differences in self-esteem based on the child's self-reported skin color. The lack of association between self-esteem and skin color was interpreted in light of a developmental tendency prevalent in early to middle childhood to place a positive value on different aspects of one's self. Whereas almost all children (96%) reported being happy or very happy with their color, 16% of the children would like to change their skin color if they could (51% to a lighter and 46% to a darker color).