The Development and Validation of a Measure of Racial Justice Perceptions

Abstract

We report three studies that develop and test a new measure of racial attitudes, the Racial Justice Scale (RJS). The concept of racial justice was developed inductively in Study 1 by means of a thematic analysis of existing measures of racial attitudes as well as a database of over 7 000 comments about racism and discrimination, taken from South African newspapers. Studies 2 and 3 investigate the reliability and validity of the RJS, and compare it with Duckitt's measure of subtle racism. The data suggest that the preliminary RJS, reported in Appendix 2, is a unidimensional and reliable measure. Although the two studies provide a mixed picture of its correlates, it does measure a different construct of racial attitudes to Duckitt's scale, which is strongly correlated with old-fashioned racism. Participation in all the studies was done on a voluntary basis, with full informed consent of the participants.