“Checking a Friend” Vs “Attended a Protest”: A Youth-Developed Social Action Scale to Measure Anti-Racist Civic Engagement

Purpose: Youth participatory action research involves young people in knowledge development at the community level. Although there is increasingly more social work research that documents these efforts, there is no research to date of youth developing measures for potential use in broader research. The proposed paper describes the development process of an Action Scale (AS) that measures anti-racist civic engagement, including item generation by a youth evaluation team and the subsequent statistical analysis by the authors to validate the measure.

Methods: As part of a participatory evaluation of a Youth Intergroup Dialogues (IGD) program— that engages adolescents in discussing racial issues within and across their communities—a youth evaluation team was created to assess the program effects on participants’ social action.  The AS was designed, through a participatory research process, to reflect behavioral actions taken by youth to address racism in their day-to-day lives. The youth evaluation team drew on examples of actions mention in previous IGD’s youth evaluation interviews to develop an initial scale.  The youth then gathered feedback from other adolescents about the range and phrasing of scale items. After expert review, for content validity, the AS was piloted (2007 and 2008) as part of the IGD program evaluation, in which 357 IGD participants (M=15 year-old) completed the AS scale. In 2014, the authors examine the scale’s internal level of consistency (reliability coefficients), criterion-related validity (correlation), and factor structure using exploratory factor analysis with data from 2007-2013.

Results: The 22-item dichotomous scale (“No” = 0, “Yes” =1), developed to report adolescents’ involvement in various social action activities that challenged racism and promoted diversity in the previous couple of months, evidenced high internal consistency (α= .79 to .78).  Results from exploratory factor analysis suggested a two-factor solution, accounting for 30% of the variance, departing slightly from the expected factor structure. Factor One, Interpersonal Action, is a factor characterized by interactions with others to address racism at the interpersonal level (e.g., Defended a friend who is the target of a racial slur or joke). Factor Two, Civic Action, is characterized by behaviors that address racism at the community and institutional level (e.g., Called/written/emailed an elected official). A statistically significant positive correlation between the AS and a related measure of intergroup communication skills, r(147) = .48, p < .01, established initial criterion-related validity estimates, and in general supported the use of the AS as a meaningful measure of social action.

Implications: The development of the AS suggests that (1) young people can be important stakeholders in program evaluation activities, (2) participatory processes have the potential for creating social research scales that have special relevance for underrepresented populations and for the ability to capture information from those least connected to traditional forms of social work research, and (3) more knowledge is needed on participatory research approaches to understand their potential for social work practice with youth.  Limitations and implications of the findings, as well as suggestions for future research and use of the AS in training will be presented.