Developing a Culturally-Sensitive Attributional Measure

Children'S Hosp Of Philadelphia, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The supplement to the Surgeon General's Report on Mental Health, entitled "Mental Health: Culture, Race, and Ethnicity" (U.S. Public Health Service, 2001) emphasizes the need to develop, adapt, and evaluate assessment and intervention techniques so that they are maximally sensitive and responsive to the needs of particular minority cultural groups. In response to this need, The Community Schools Program at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) proposes to develop a social information processing measure for inner-city African American girls that is scientifically grounded, based in principles of partnership-based research, and informed by advances of video technologies. The new measure, The Assessment of Social Information Processing through Videos (ASIP-V), will draw upon the reformulated social information processing (SIP) theory, which posits that a child's ability to process a series of social cues within the environment will determine whether he/she responds aggressively. With funding from NIMH (K23 Award), the principal investigator has developed expertise in designing social cognitive measures for urban ethnic minority girls. The proposed R21 extends this partnership-based measurement development research, by combining empirically supported literature with consultation from content area experts and community consultants, and focus groups with 3rd and 4th grade girls, playground supervisors, and teachers to design 8 video vignettes to assess inner-city African American girls' SIP. Following this, an open pilot study with forty 3rd and 4th grade girls from a different school will be conducted in order to obtain information necessary to finalize the measure. Then in Year 2, 190 African American inner-city girls will participate in a validation study to determine whether the factor structure of the ASIP-V conforms to the theoretical factor structure outlined in the reformulated SIP theory (Crick & Dodge, 1994), and whether the measure has strong ecological validity and acceptability for inner-city African American girls. Relevance: This study will develop and validate a culturally-relevant.measure that could be extremely useful in future studies examining the social information processing among urban African American girls.