Cross-Cultural Equivalence of a Measure of Perceived Discrimination Between Chinese-Americans and Vietnamese-Americans

Abstract

This article examines the cross-cultural equivalence of the Williams Everyday Discrimination Scale with 484 Vietnamese-Americans and 586 Chinese-Americans from the National Latino and Asian American Study (NLAAS). Reliability and validity analyses were conducted to determine the cross-cultural comparability of the scale between the Vietnamese and Chinese samples in the data. Results indicated that five items out of the original nine which captured a perceived sense of unfair treatment were comparable between the two samples. These results suggest that this five-item scale can be used in future research in identifying culturally and ethnically different causes and consequences of perceived discrimination.

Keywords:

• discrimination
• Asian-American populations
• Chinese
• Vietnamese
• confirmatory factor analysis
• measurement invariance
• cross-cultural research