Measuring Community Mobilization in the Seattle Minority Youth Health Project

Abstract

This article assesses the validity and reliability of the approach used to measure community mo bilization in the Seattle Minority Youth Health Project (MYHealth), a neighborhood-based pro gram to prevent drug use, violence, teen pregnancy, and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Two constructs were measured: neighborhood cooperation in solving problems, and sense of pride and identification with the neighborhood. The convergent validity of the measurement ap proach was assessed by comparing several independent measures of community mobilization generatedfrom surveys of key neighborhood leaders, youth, and parents. For the neighborhood cooperation construct, correlations were uniformly positive across measuresfrom different sur veys and statistically significant about a quarter of the time. The correlations for the neighbor hood pride construct were weaker and generally not statistically significant. Interrater reliabil ity was low for all of the surveys, possibly reflecting varying ideas about what community mobili zation meant among survey respondents.