The Cultural Socialization Scale: Assessing family and peer socialization toward heritage and mainstream cultures

Abstract

In a culturally diverse society, youth learn about multiple cultures from a variety of sources, yet the existing assessment of cultural socialization has been limited to parents' efforts to teach youth about their heritage culture. The current study adapted and extended an existing cultural socialization measure (Umaña-Taylor & Fine, 2004) to assess 4 types of socialization practices encountered specifically during adolescence: cultural socialization by families and peers toward both one's heritage culture and the mainstream culture. In a pilot study, we developed the Cultural Socialization Scale based on retrospective reports from 208 young adults, maximizing young adults' ability to reason and reflect their adolescent experiences with various socialization practices. In the primary study, we examined the psychometric properties of the scale using reports from 252 adolescents. Cultural socialization occurred from both socialization agents toward both cultures. Our Cultural Socialization Scale demonstrated stable factor structures and high reliabilities. We observed strong factorial invariance across the 4 subscales (6 items). Multiple indicators multiple causes models also demonstrated invariance for each subscale across adolescents' demographic characteristics (i.e., gender, race/ethnicity, nativity, socioeconomic status, language of assessment). The implications of the Cultural Socialization Scale are discussed.