Developing a comprehensive scale to assess college multicultural programming.
A barrier to assessing effectiveness of multicultural programming is lack of a relatively brief instrument to measure the wide range of intended outcomes. A frequent goal of programming is to increase cultural empathy, but this is rarely the only intended outcome. We conducted focus groups of campus administrators, student affairs staff, and undergraduate instructors who identified a full range of racial/ethnic multicultural competencies that undergraduates should possess. An 84-item pool generated from these focus groups was combined with the 31-item Scale of Ethnocultural Empathy (SEE; Wang et al., 2003). These 115 items, together with instruments used to gauge concurrent validity, were administered to White undergraduate students in introductory psychology courses at the midpoint (n = 602) and end (n = 676) of fall semester. Exploratory factor analysis suggested 6 subscales for the Everyday Multicultural Competencies/Revised SEE (EMC/RSEE): (a) Cultural Openness and Desire to Learn; (b) Resentment and Cultural Dominance; (c) Anxiety and Lack of Multicultural Self-Efficacy; (d) Empathic Perspective-Taking; (e) Awareness of Contemporary Racism and Privilege; and (f) Empathic Feeling and Acting as an Ally. Item response theory principles guided final selection of subscale items. Analyses suggested good factor stability, reliability, and discriminant validity of the 48-item EMC/RSEE in these undergraduate samples. EMC/RSEE subscales were not strongly correlated with a measure of impression management and were significantly associated with measures of Openness to Diversity Challenge, and Universal-Diverse Orientation.
Department of Psychology, University of Tennessee.
Brent
B
Mallinckrodt
Department of Psychology, University of Tennessee.
Joseph R
JR
Miles
Department of Psychology, University of Tennessee.
Tripti
T
Bhaskar
Department of Psychology, University of Tennessee.
Nicole
N
Chery
Department of Psychology, University of Tennessee.
Gahee
G
Choi
Department of Psychology, University of Tennessee.
Mi-Ra
MR
Sung
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D054521:Cultural Competency; D018864:Cultural Diversity; D004645:Empathy; D005260:Female; D017144:Focus Groups; D006608:Hierarchy, Social; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011582:Psychological Theory; D011584:Psychology / Q000193:education; D011594:Psychometrics / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D020377:Self Efficacy; D013334:Students / Q000523:psychology*; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D055815:Young Adult