Ethnic Social Comfort I: Construct Validity Through Social Distance Measurement

Abstract

Emotion-related constructs hold understudied promise for understanding interand intraethnic attitudes and behaviors of African Americans. This article describes preliminary steps taken to explore the construct of interethnic social comfort through the revision and expansion of an existing measure of interethnic social distance, and to explore its psychometric properties among several subsamples of a group of 238 African American undergraduates. Items from the Revised Social Scales were found free from traditional social desirability. Factor analyses suggested a single-factor latent structure for in-group (i.e., Black) social comfort and a two-factor latent structure for out-group (i.e., White) social comfort, which distinguished intimate from nonintimate relationships. Subscales based on these analyses showed high internal consistency reliability and convergent and discriminant validity by patterns of correlations with measures of ethnic identity, related attitudes, self-relevant beliefs, and demographic background. Gender and other demographic differences, limitations, and next steps for establishing validity are discussed.