Theory and Development of the Diasporic Identity Scale with Adopted Korean Americans

Abstract

Drawing upon diaspora scholarship and social identity theory, we propose a new psychological construct – diasporic identity – to capture how transnationally adopted individuals draw meaning from their migrations, the communities that they construct, and their relationships with their homeland. We describe the development of a new self-report measure – the Diasporic Identity Scale (DIS) – to assess this construct, and we provide initial psychometric evidence for it using a sample of transnationally adopted Korean American adolescents (N = 117). The DIS comprises two dimensions: solidarity (r =.90) and homeland attachment (r =.88). Diasporic solidarity is a sense of within-group empathy and emphasizes community building; homeland attachment captures a desire to return to the homeland and for cultural roots. Exploratory factor analysis supports the two-factor structure. We also provide initial evidence for convergent, discriminant, and concurrent validity. Supplemental data for this article is available online at