Psychometric evaluation of the Everyday Discrimination Scale in KHANDLE

Abstract

AbstractBackgroundStructural racism manifests in differential experiences of everyday discrimination for racialized and minoritized groups. The Everyday Discrimination Scale (EDS) assesses subjective experiences of unfair treatment in everyday social situations. The goal of this study is to evaluate the psychometric performance of the EDS within racialized groups and specifically to evaluate if the EDS measures a unidimensional construct.MethodData was from a diverse sample of community‐dwelling older adults in Northern California (N = 1,590 participants) from the Kaiser Healthy Aging and Diverse Life Experiences (KHANDLE) Study (Non‐Hispanic (NH) Black = 411; NH Asian = 380; NH white = 477; LatinX = 322). The EDS is a 9‐item scale with six response categories that range from “almost everyday” to “never”. The EDS was administered to each participant at baseline. We used confirmatory factor analysis to evaluate unidimensionality in the combined sample and in the 4 racialized subgroups. We identified model modifications that improved fit in a random 50% subsample of each group and tested fit of the modified model in the other random 50%.ResultLoadings for all items on the main factor were > 0.50 for each racialized group and for the full sample. There were issues with model fit with the full sample, which were improved when residual correlations were set between items “courtesy” and “respect” and between “insult” and “threat”. Cross‐validated model fit was improved after adding these parameters to the model and was best in groups racialized as Black and LatinX (Table 1).ConclusionThe EDS is a commonly used assessment in aging studies purporting to capture effects of discrimination on a variety of health and psychosocial outcomes. Our study show that all EDS items are strongly associated with underlying construct of discrimination in all groups, though differentially. Further work is needed to determine if the identified residual correlations point to additional factors that are important to measure. Model fit suggests the EDS is better suited to capture discrimination in groups racialized as Black and LatinX groups, which is consistent with the development of the scale. This study expands the literature by carefully examining the measurement properties of the EDS among four racialized groups.