Measuring Bicultural Ethnic Identity among American Indian Adolescents

Based on the premise that ethnic identity provides a fruitful approach to exploring issues related to ethnicity, an empirically based strategy was used to develop a measure of ethnic identity among American Indian adolescents. Because American Indians live in two worlds, a bicultural approach was drawn on to measure the degree that respondents identified with Indian culture and with the mainstream or White culture. An exploratory factor analysis was used to examine the structure of ethnic identity among Indian adolescents and the resulting models were tested with confirmatory factor analysis. A scale for measuring bicultural ethnic identity was developed and the reliability and validity of the scale was assessed.