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The Psychological Sense of Economic Hardship: Measurement Models, Validity, and Cross‐Ethnic Equivalence for Urban Families
Author(s) -
Barrera Manuel,
Caples Heather,
Tein Jenn-Yun
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
american journal of community psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.113
H-Index - 112
eISSN - 1573-2770
pISSN - 0091-0562
DOI - 10.1023/a:1010328115110
Subject(s) - ethnic group , poverty , psychology , construct (python library) , stressor , equivalence (formal languages) , health psychology , social psychology , construct validity , socioeconomic status , developmental psychology , sociology , clinical psychology , economic growth , psychometrics , demography , public health , economics , medicine , linguistics , philosophy , nursing , anthropology , computer science , programming language , population
Poverty is a community stressor that disproportionally affects ethnic minority families. One aspect of programmatic research on poverty focuses on the psychological sense of economic hardship. In a study of 319 African American, European American, and Mexican American urban families, parents completed objective measures of economic status and scales of perceived economic hardship that were adapted from previous research. Measurement models identified a coherent construct of psychological sense of economic hardship that was essentially equivalent for mothers and fathers, English‐ and Spanish‐speaking Mexican Americans, and the 3 ethnic groups. In support of the validity of this construct, relations between objective indicators of economic status and perceived economic hardship showed equivalence across these same groups.