How Can We Better Measure Psychological Acculturation Among Latine Caregivers?

What is it about?

Acculturation is often measured by looking at behaviors, such as the language someone speaks, the media they consume, or other cultural practices. But these behaviors may not fully capture the psychological experience of navigating multiple cultures—particularly people's feelings of cultural attachment, identity, and belonging. The Psychological Acculturation Scale (PAS) was designed to capture these more internal experiences, but it had received limited psychometric evaluation. In this study, we evaluated the PAS among 511 Latine caregivers of children with emotional or behavioral concerns living in the United States, including 275 who completed the survey in English and 236 in Spanish. We examined the measure's structure, reliability, construct validity, and whether it functioned similarly across its English and Spanish versions. Overall, our analyses supported using the PAS as a brief, unidimensional proxy for psychological acculturation. The scale demonstrated excellent reliability, and scores varied in expected ways according to language preference, survey language, and generation in the United States. Although exploratory analyses identified possible dimensions involving cultural identity/social belonging and cultural competence/familiarity, these dimensions overlapped substantially, and bifactor analyses indicated that most of the common variance was explained by a single global factor.

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Photo by Mayur Deshpande on Unsplash

Photo by Mayur Deshpande on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Understanding acculturation matters because navigating different cultural contexts can influence mental health, resilience, family experiences, and decisions about seeking mental health services. Yet much of the existing research measures acculturation through observable behaviors rather than people's internal sense of cultural connection and belonging. Our findings suggest that the PAS can provide researchers with a relatively brief way of assessing this often-overlooked psychological dimension of acculturation. Importantly, however, we also found that the scale did not demonstrate configural invariance across its English and Spanish versions. This means that the underlying structure of the measure differed across language forms, so researchers should be cautious when directly interpreting differences in PAS scores between people completing the measure in English versus Spanish. This is especially important for research with multilingual Latine populations. Differences observed between language groups can reflect meaningful cultural differences, but they can also reflect differences in how a measure functions across languages. Establishing that distinction is critical if we want culturally responsive research to produce valid conclusions.