Does a Widely Used Measure of Mexican American Cultural Values Work for College Students?

What is it about?

The Mexican American Cultural Values Scale (MACVS) is widely used to study cultural values such as family support and obligations, respect, religion, traditional gender roles, independence, and personal achievement. However, the measure was originally developed with Mexican American adolescents and their parents, even though researchers have increasingly used it with college students. In this study, we examined whether the MACVS works as intended among college students. We analyzed data from 495 students attending Hispanic-serving universities, including 341 Mexican American students and 154 students from other Latine backgrounds. We examined the reliability of the scale, its relationships with discrimination and acculturation, and whether its proposed structure adequately represented cultural values among these students. Although many individual parts of the scale showed adequate reliability, the overall structure proposed for the MACVS did not adequately fit the data for Mexican American college students. Exploratory analyses also raised concerns about applying the measure to college students from other Latine backgrounds. These findings suggest that cultural values—and how we measure them—may vary depending on people's developmental, educational, and cultural contexts.

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Photo by Haseeb Jamil on Unsplash

Photo by Haseeb Jamil on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Measures such as the MACVS shape what researchers conclude about the role of culture in mental health, education, and other important outcomes. The MACVS has been widely used, including in research showing that cultural values such as familism may protect against the negative effects of discrimination and other stressors. However, using a measure with a population different from the one for which it was originally developed requires evidence that the measure functions appropriately in that new context. Our findings demonstrate why researchers should not assume that a well-established measure will function in the same way across populations simply because they share aspects of a cultural background. The expected structure of the MACVS did not adequately represent responses from Mexican American college students, and the measure also did not demonstrate the basic level of measurement equivalence needed to support comparisons between Mexican American and non-Mexican American college students. These findings highlight the importance of continually evaluating culturally focused measures as they are applied to new populations and contexts. Doing so can help researchers avoid drawing conclusions about cultural differences that may instead reflect problems with how culture is being measured.