Testing invariance of ethnic-racial discrimination and identity measures for adolescents across ethnic-racial groups and contexts.

Abstract

Ethnic-racial discrimination experiences, ethnic-racial identity (ERI) development, and attitudes toward other ethnic-racial group contact all make important contributions to individuals' health and well-being. Absent from the literature is systematic examination of whether these constructs may be measured equivalently for adolescents from different ethnic-racial groups living in different contexts. In 2 large ethno-racially diverse samples of high school students in the Southwestern (N ϭ 2,136) and Midwestern (N ϭ 1,055) United States, the current study tested invariance of 4 widely used measures, including

Ethnic-Racial Identity and Adolescents’ Positive Development in the Context of Ethnic-Racial Marginalization: Unpacking Risk and Resilience

“…For instance, some of the mixed findings evident in the literature may be due to issues of measurement (Schwartz et al, 2014). Measures of both ERI and discrimination are often used with multiple ethnic/racial groups without consideration of potential measurement invariance, in part due to limited available work assessing the psychometric properties of such measures across groups (for an example of one such study, see Sladek et al, 2020). Relatedly, measures vary in the terminology used to capture both identity and discrimination, variously referencing "ethnic," "racial," and "ethnic/ racial."…”

How Racial/Ethnic Diversity in Urban Schools Shapes Intergroup Relations and Well-Being: Unpacking Intersectionality and Multiple Identities Perspectives

“…Responses were rated on a 5-point scale, ranging from 0 (never) to 4 (a whole lot). The race/ethnicity discrimination subscales for peer and adult perpetrators show strong measurement invariance across multiple adolescent samples representing the racial/ethnic groups included in this study (Sladek et al, 2020). Given the positively skewed distribution of ratings (skewness range = 1.53-8.98), with very few students reporting "A lot" and "A whole lot, " responses in both categories were collapsed with "A few times" to create a 3-point scale.…”

Effects of Receiving Genetic Ancestry Results on Emerging Adults’ Ethnic-Racial Identity Affirmation

“…Further, it is possible that ethnicity/race and gender impact how receiving genetic ancestry results affect ERI affirmation. Research suggests that individuals who identify as a Person of Color tend to have higher ERI affirmation than individuals who identify as White (Sladek et al, 2020), and that females tend to have higher ERI affirmation than males (Hughes et al, 2009). Intersectionality Theory (Crenshaw, 1989) holds that a holistic individual is more than the sum of race and gender alone.…”

“…Based on the Lifespan Model of ERI (Williams et al, 2020), we hypothesized that emerging adults in the testing condition who received their genetic ancestry results before the post-test would experience pre-test to post-test increases in ERI affirmation, and individuals in the control condition who received their results after the post-test would not experience pre-test to post-test increases in ERI affirmation. Based on Intersectionality Theory (Crenshaw, 1989), recommendations to explore intersections in ERI research (Velez & Spencer, 2018), and existing empirical work that found ethnicity/race and gender differences in ERI (Hughes et al, 2009;Sladek et al, 2020), we further tested whether the intersection of ethnicity/race and gender played a role in the relation between receiving genetic ancestry results and ERI affirmation.…”