title: Measuring community mobilization in the Seattle Minority Youth Health Project.
abstract: This article assesses the validity and reliability of the approach used to measure community mobilization in the Seattle Minority Youth Health Project (MY Health), a neighborhood-based program to prevent drug use, violence, teen pregnancy, and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Two constructs were measured: neighborhood cooperation in solving problems, and sense of pride and identification with the neighborhood. The convergent validity of the measurement approach was assessed by comparing several independent measures of community mobilization generated from surveys of key neighborhood leaders, youth, and parents. For the neighborhood cooperation construct, correlations were uniformly positive across measures from different surveys and statistically significant about a quarter of the time. The correlations for the neighborhood pride construct were weaker and generally not statistically significant. Interrater reliability was low for all of the surveys, possibly reflecting varying ideas about what community mobilization meant among survey respondents.
authors.affiliation: University of Washington, USA.
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Cheadle
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Wagner
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Anderman
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Walls
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: McBride
authors.forename: M A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Bell
authors.forename: R F
authors.initials: RF
authors.lastname: Catalano
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Pettigrew
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D016497:Adolescent Health Services / Q000458:organization & administration; D000328:Adult; D003153:Community Health Services / Q000458:organization & administration*; D019058:Community Networks / Q000458:organization & administration*; D003159:Community-Institutional Relations; D005260:Female; D006293:Health Promotion / Q000458:organization & administration; D006306:Health Surveys; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008913:Minority Groups; D011247:Pregnancy; D015397:Program Evaluation; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D018401:Sample Size; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014505:Urban Population; D014861:Washington