Development of a Short Acculturation Scale for Hispanics

Abstract

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.

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“…Despite controversies regarding the measurement of acculturation, the results from the current study suggest the benefits of this four-item scale as a brief measure of acculturation, particularly when this measure is combined with data regarding length of stay in the United States, country of birth, and language use during face-to-face interviews. These results further support Marin et al 's original assertion that language alone can be used as a measure of acculturation, especially when measuring all the dimensions of acculturation is impractical and may prevent other researchers from measuring acculturation at all (4,20,29). Future research should include a larger and more evenly distributed sample where multivariate methods such as regression analyses could be used to examine potential predictors of acculturation including age, parity, social support, country of origin, and length of time in the United States.…”

“…Cobas and his colleagues found that when they used the Cuellar (19) acculturation scale to reanalyze 1989 Scribner and Dwyer Hispanic negative birth outcome data, the four language items on the scale loaded higher than ethnic identification for both prediction of smoking and lowbirthweight status (20,23,24). This analysis further reinforces the premise that language usage is a dominant factor in measuring levels of Hispanic acculturation.…”

“…Of these three factors, language again appeared to be the most reliable factor with an alpha coefficient of 0.90 (20).…”

“…Despite the controversy regarding the most accurate and practical method for measuring acculturation among Latino immigrants, acculturation scales that incorporate language preference as a dominant factor continue to provide evidence of reliability and validity in heterogeneous subpopulations (20)(21)(22)(23)(24). Research conducted at Los Angeles prenatal clinics (n = 911) examined the association between acculturation of first generation Mexican immigrants (n = 545) and Mexican American women (n = 366) and factors in low birthweight and preterm delivery.…”

Social‐cognitive aspects of underserved Latinas preparing to undergo genetic cancer risk assessment for hereditary breast and ovarian cancer

“…The Short Acculturation Scale for Hispanics, adapted to include 5 of the 12 items focused on language, was used to measure acculturation [64]. Data suggest that this language-based version can be used independently as a measure of acculturation (Cronbach's alpha for the 5-item scale 5 0.90) [64].…”