Attitudes toward Asian Americans: developing a prejudice scale.

Four studies addressed the development and validation of the Anti-Asian American Prejudice Scale (AAAPS), a scale that measures levels of ambivalent prejudice against Asian Americans.The main hypothesis was that differential expressions of anti- Asian American prejudice relate to two stereotype dimensions: (excessive) competence and (lack of) sociability.Thus, the anti-Asian American profile was presumed to differ fi-om sexism and anti-Black racism, which depict the targets as incompetent and socially skilled.Study 1 initiated scale construction and involved 296 respondents to a 131-item racial attitudes questionnaire.Studies 2 and 3, which contributed to further scale development and validation, included 684 respondents to a focused 25-item version of the AAAPS.Eighty-five White American participants completed the final 25-item AAAPS in Study 4, which tested the scale's predictive power in two ways: (1) by examining whether respondents' scores could predict actual social distance behaviors toward Asian Americans; and (2) by experimentally investigating how the situational context might influence high-and low-prejudice individuals' evaluative judgments of an Asian American target.vi Altogether the studies demonstrate the vahdity of the AAAPS and also provide meaningful insight into the ambivalent nature of anti-Asian American prejudice.Besides its practical and social utility, this scale assesses, for the first time, prejudice against Asian Americans, which contrasts with the most-often studied form of racial prejudice (against Black Americans).