Five out of six measures of identity and solidarity with U.S. people of color are equivalent across English and Spanish interviews

As the US continues to racially diversify, researchers are increasingly investigating the prevalence of self-identification as – and feelings of solidarity with – people of color (PoC). Prior research establishes these concepts as related, but distinct, nodes in the identity-to-politics link among PoC. Yet the evidence for this pattern is exclusively from monolingual samples of English-speaking PoC. This raises serious questions about whether measures of identity and solidarity perform optimally across PoC who (do not) speak English. We evaluated the linguistic equivalence of six survey items designed to measure PoC identity and solidarity in a large, high-quality sample of English- and Spanish-speaking Latino adults (N = 1269). We assessed whether this item battery captures two concepts (configural equivalence), with similar meaning (metric equivalence), which enables valid comparisons across this language divide (scalar equivalence). Using a series of multi-group confirmatory factor analytic (MG-CFA) models, we find that five (5) of these six (6) perform equivalently across English- and Spanish-speaking Latinos: a key demographic among PoC.