Friday, 14 January 2005 - 10:00 AM

This presentation is part of: Acculturation and Biculturalism in Latino Adolescents: Mapping Risk and Protective Factors, Examining Measurement Strategies, and Evaluating Intervention Approaches

Operationalizing Biculturalism: Comparing Simplistic Measures of a Complex Construct

Purpose

Acculturation and biculturalism have been important social science research constructs for the past 100 years. Unfortunately, few studies have directly compared different commonly-used methods of measuring acculturation and biculturalism. This study compared a number of acculturation and biculturalism items and scales in order to assess the predictive utility of each.

Methods

Sample

The study sample consisted of 150 Latino immigrant adolescents. All adolescents were between 12 and 18 years old, were foreign born, and had lived in the U.S. for 10 years or less. Sixty-four percent of participants were from Mexico, 12% from Colombia, and the remainder was from other Central and South American countries.

Acculturation and Biculturalism Measures

Language use was measured with one item asking, “What language do you prefer to speak?”. Response options indicated English all the time, English most of the time, Spanish and English equally, Spanish most of the time, and Spanish all the time. Length of time spent in the U.S. was a continuous variable that measured the number of years since immigration. The Bicultural Involvement Questionnaire (BIQ: Szapocznik, et al., 1980) was used to measure involvement in Latino culture, involvement in non-Latino (U.S.) culture, and total biculturalism. The BIQ has 33 items on a 5 point Likert scale (“Not at all” to “Very much”). Questions are separated into Latino and American categories and adding the Latino and American subscale scores provided a total biculturalism score. Finally, the Psychological Acculturation Scale (Tropp, et al., 1999) measured attachment and belonging to American and Latino cultures with ten items on a 9-point scale (1 “only with Latinos”, 5 “with Latinos and Americans equally” and 9 “only with Americans”).

Dependent Variables

Dependent measures were collected from adolescents using the Child Behavior Check List (CBCL) Youth Self Report (YSR). Adding CBCL - YSR items yielded continuous subscales that served as the dependent measures for this investigation. Subscales measured; anxious/depressed behavior, withdrawn/depressed behavior, internalizing behavior problems, social problems, affect problems, externalizing behavior problems, and total problems.

Data Analysis

Hierarchical multiple regression analyses were conducted.

Results

Acculturation and biculturalism measures were significantly correlated with each other, showing convergent validity. However, only the two BIQ subscales measuring involvement in Latino and non-Latino (U.S.) cultures were significantly related to adolescent outcomes measured by the CBCL-YSR. These subscales could not be entered into the same multiple regression equation because of high shared variance and multicolinearity. Total biculturalism scores were not significantly related to independent or outcome variables. Operationalizing biculturalism as the interaction term between Latino and non-Latino (U.S.) cultural involvement also showed no predictive utility.

Implications for Social Work Research

Social work researchers interested in acculturation and biculturalism should use separate measures of Latino and non-Latino (U.S.) cultural involvement rather than proxy measures (language use, time spent in the U.S.) or measures using Latino-to-American Likert scales. Effectively operationalizing biculturalism remains a challenge. Social work researchers need to develop new ways of measuring this important construct.

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