Ethnic social comfort I: Construct validity through social distance measurement

Emotion-related constructs hold understudied promise for understanding inter-and intraethnic attitudes and behaviors of African Americans. This article de-scribes preliminary steps taken to explore the construct of interethnic social com-fort through the revision and expansion of an existing measure of interethnic so-cial distance, and to explore its psychometric properties among several subsamples of a group of 238 African American undergraduates. Items from the Revised Social Scales were found free from traditional social desirability. Factor analyses suggested a single-factor latent structure for in-group (i.e., Black) so-cial comfort and a two-factor latent structure for out-group (i.e., White) social comfort, which distinguished intimate from nonintimate relationships. Subscales based on these analyses showed high internal consistency reliability and conver-gent and discriminant validity by patterns of correlations with measures of ethnic identity, related attitudes, self-relevant beliefs, and demographic background. Gender and other demographic differences, limitations, and next steps for establishing validity are discussed