This article reports the development of a short (12-item) acculturation scale for Hispanics. Separate factor analyses of the responses of 363 Hispanics and 228 non-Hispanic whites produced three factors: "Language Use," "Media," and "Ethnic Social Relations." The 12-item scale (explaining 67.6% of the variance for Hispanics) correlated highly with the following validation criteria: respondents' generation, length of residence in the U.S., age at arrival, ethnic self-identification, and with an acculturation index. The first factor consists of only five items and explains 54.5% of the variance while maintaining strong correlations with the various criteria. The validity and reliability coefficients for this new short scale are comparable to those obtained for other published scales. Separate validations for Mexican Americans and Central Americans showed similar results.

This investigation studied the effects of acculturation on attitudinal familism in 452 Hispanics compared to 227 white nonHispanics. Despite differences in the national origin of Hispanics, Mexican-, Central -and Cuban-Americans reported similar attitudes toward the family indicating that familism is a core characteristic in the Hispanic culture. Three basic dimensions of familism were found: Familial obligations, perceived support from the family and family as referents. The high level of perceived family support, invariable despite changes in acculturation, is the most essential dimension of Hispanic familism. Familial obligations and the perception of the family as referents appear to diminish with the level of acculturation, but the perception of family support doesn't change. Although these two dimensions of familism decrease concurrently with the level of acculturation, the attitudes of persons with high levels of acculturation are more familistic than those of white nonHispanics.

To identify access, attitudes, and health practices of Latina women undergoing regular mammography and Pap smear screening, 977 Latinas aged 40 to 74, residing in four California cities, answered a telephone interview. Forty-one percent of women had regular mammography, and 73% had regular Pap smear screening. Cancer screening maintenance was associated with having health insurance, a regular place of care, and fewer fatalistic attitudes about cancer. Regular mammography and Pap smear screening were also associated with ever being married, attending church, and having taken hormone replacement therapy. Being older than 50, residing in the United States a long time, and having had a hysterectomy predicted mammography maintenance. Pap smear screening maintenance was negatively associated with poverty, old age, and negative attitudes toward physicians. There are structural and attitudinal barriers to regular cancer screening among Latinas. Interventions that increase access to care and address women's attitudes about cancer are needed.

The behavioral theory constructs most often used to study mammography utilization-perceived benefit, perceived susceptibility, self-efficacy, intention, and subjective norms-have neither been developed nor sufficiently tested among diverse racial/ethnic subgroups. The authors explored these constructs and their underlying assumptions relating to the social context of Filipina and Latina women. The mixed-methods study included testing construct measures in the multilingual surveys of a concurrent intervention study of 1,463 women from five ethnic groups. social context and individual screening behavior. In-depth interviews were conducted with 11 key informant scholars, 13 community gatekeepers, and 29 lay women, and a supplemental study videotaped and interviewed 9 mother-daughter dyads. Three social context domains emerged: relational culture, social capital, and transculturation and transmigration. The meaning and appropriateness of the five behavioral constructs were analyzed in relation to these domains. In contradistinction to tenets of behavioral theory, the authors found that social context can influence behavior directly, circumventing or attenuating the influence of individual beliefs; contextual influences, synthesized from multiple perspectives, can operate at an unconscious level not accessible to the individual; and contextual influences are dynamic, contingent on distal and proximal forces coming together in a given moment and are thus not consistent with an exclusive focus at the individual level. This article describes the study methods, summarizes main findings, and previews the detailed results presented in the other articles in this issue.Keywords behavioral theory; culture; social context; mixed methods; mammographyThe compass is a device whose function is inseparable from its context of origin, the planet Earth. Based on the concept of a magnetic north, a compass would not be useful, for example, on Mars with that planet's multiple magnetic fields. According to one NASA scientist, "If you were a boy scout with a compass on Mars, you would be lost" (J. E. P. Connerney, personal communication, August 22, 2003). Much of health behavior theory, anchored in the realm of individual cognition, has been developed and tested predominantly among university students (Ajzen, 1991) and then applied far more broadly. The bases for the theories are commonalities within groups in factors that influence behavior and the consistency and predictability of relationships among those factors. But these theoretically derived patterns do not operate in the same way for all people. Instead, when used in multicultural settings and among those of diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, this body of work can be likened to "a compass on Mars," a navigational tool that is designed for a set of forces and principles likely to operate differently-or not at all-in another milieu. Yet there is an implied universality in the way health behavior theories and their constructs are used. Despite the current emphasis on dissemin...