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Symposium

Adapting a Brief Measure of the Relationship Dimension in Yup’ik Alaska Native Families

Adapting a Brief Measure of the Relationship Dimension in Yup’ik Alaska Native Families by  James Allen, David B. Henry, Carlotta Ching Ting Fok, and the People Awakening Team

Adapting a Brief Measure of the Relationship Dimension in Yup’ik Alaska Native Families

James Allen, University of Alaska Fairbanks
David B. Henry, University of Illinois at Chicago
Carlotta Ching Ting Fok, University of Alaska Fairbanks
People Awakening Team, University of Alaska Fairbanks

We describe our efforts to develop a measure of family functioning for our prevention work with Yup’ik Alaska Native youth and their families. Our presentation illustrates solutions to some of the challenges in creating measures that are culturally resonant and sensitive to change associated with intervention effect. We will focus on our work originally intended to adapt the Family Environment Scale (FES; Moos & Moos, 1981) relationship dimension items to measure Yup’ik youth and parent’s perceptions of the quality of their family relationships, which in this indigenous cultural group are traditionally organized around an extended kinship family structure aligned towards collectivist orientations.  We describe here our collaborative measurement development  process with our community co-researcher team. We also overview our use of item response theory and confirmatory factor analysis methods to identify good functioning items and subscales.  These adaptation efforts required us to rewrite all the FES items for local understandability and relevance, and to author new items to tap additional domains of importance, in the end resulting in a new measure, the Brief Family Relationship Scale (BFRS). We summarize psychometric properties and internal structure with 284 12 to18 year-old Yup’ik Eskimo Alaska Native adolescents from rural, remote communities. These analyses demonstrated a subset of the new and adapted items function satisfactorily at different grades of item level difficulty, a three-response alternative format provided the most meaningful information, and the measure’s underlying structure is best described through three distinct first-order factors, organized under one higher order factor, with evidence of convergent and discriminant validity. 

View or download the narrated PowerPoint Slide Show here.

Please download this file to hear the audio narration. These slides are the property of the authors, and are shared through the Global Journal of Community Psychology Practice (http://www.gjcpp.org/).


Author(s)

James Allen, David B. Henry, Carlotta Ching Ting Fok, and the People Awakening Team James Allen, David B. Henry, Carlotta Ching Ting Fok, and the People Awakening Team

James Allen, University of Alaska Fairbanks
David B. Henry, University of Illinois at Chicago
Carlotta Ching Ting Fok, University of Alaska Fairbanks
People Awakening Team, University of Alaska Fairbanks


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Keywords: scra biennial conference, community psychology practice, gjcpp