The prejudice against asylum seekers scale: presenting the psychometric properties of a new measure of classical and conditional attitudes

ABSTRACT

This paper reports the initial psychometric properties for the recently developed prejudice against asylum seekers scale (PAAS)—a new measure of the classical and conditional components of negative attitudes towards asylum seekers. Across three studies the initial psychometric evidence is presented: An exploratory factor analysis suggested that the 16 items of the PAAS accurately factor onto the two hypothesized subscales (Study 1), which was ratified using a confirmatory factor analysis (Study 2). The presented reliability estimates (internal consistency: Studies 1–3; test-retest reliability: Study 3) verified the stability of the measure. Finally, evidence of the validity for the scale (criterion, construct, and known-groups; Study 2) and for the independent predictive validity of each subscale is presented. In summary, the evidence presented here suggests that the PAAS is a psychometrically sound measure of classical and contemporary prejudice against asylum seekers.

KEYWORDS:

• Asylum seeker
• PAAS
• psychometric
• refugee
• scale development
• test construction

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/7pw8r/

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/7pw8r/

Notes

1. The materials and data sets for Studies 1–3 are available through the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/7pw8r/. This manuscript and the questionnaire provide the necessary information for an independent researcher to replicate the methodology and the analyses.

2. The conditional prejudice subscale assesses a version of modern prejudice; however, I decided not to label this scale the “modern prejudice” subscale because it does not assess one of the features of modern prejudice—specifically, it does not capture the denial of the discrimination of asylum seekers.

3. Sixteen items were generated and retained. In order to ensure that the items are content valid (and thus reflect the entire domain of the constructs), the protocol, formula, and critical values originally put forward by Lawshe (1975) and refined by Wilson, Pan, and Schumsky (2012) were used to calculate content validity ratio’s (CVR). Based on reviews by 14 subject matter experts, both CL-PAAS (M_CVR = .82) and CO-PAAS (M_CVR = .71) were revealed to have item- and dimension-level content validity (CVRs > .56). Please contact the author for full details.

4. TAFE courses are predominantly vocational tertiary education courses which are common in Australia and nationally recognized.

5. In an attempt to monitor the quality of the online responses, attention check items were randomly inserted throughout the questionnaire to ensure that participant responses for each item were given due consideration. The latency for each block was also monitored for overly-speedy responses. No participants were excluded due to these reasons.

6. Political orientation is measured in Study 2 on a 5-point scale. Please note that this differs from the 7-point response scale used in Study 1.

7. The error terms were allowed to correlate to improve the local fit based on the modification indices only if they were modelled within the same factor. This decision was informed by arguments Landis and colleagues (2009) that “the degree that two residuals correlate, there is evidence that there exists a cause of both of the variables to which the residuals are attached but that is not specified in the model” (p. 17). Measurement error covariances help to include the effect of that extraneous variable accounted for in the model without an actual specification of that variable (Fornell, 1983).

8. Effect sizes were calculated from the observed R ² and were calculated using software by Soper (2015) based on the work of Cohen (1988).