Development of a Short Acculturation Scale for Hispanics

TLDR

The study develops a concise 12‑item acculturation scale for Hispanics. Factor analyses of 363 Hispanic and 228 non‑Hispanic white respondents identified three factors—Language Use, Media, and Ethnic Social Relations—that together form the scale. The resulting scale explains 67.6 % of variance in Hispanic responses, strongly correlates with generation, length of U.S.

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.