The Racism, Acceptance, and Cultural-Ethnocentrism Scale (RACES): Measuring Racism in Australia

No existing scale has been designed for, and validated in, the Australian context which can objectively evaluate the levels of general racist attitudes in Australian individuals or groups. Existing Australian measures of racist attitudes focus on single groups or have not been validated across the lifespan. Without suitable instruments, racism reduction programs implemented in Australia cannot be appropriately evaluated and so cannot be judged to be making a meaningful difference to the attitudes of the participants. To address the need for a general measure of racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious acceptance, an Australian scale was developed and validated for use with children, adolescents, and adults. The Racism, Acceptance, and Cultural-Ethnocentrism Scale (RACES) is a 34-item self-report instrument measuring explicit racist attitudes, consisting of three interdependent subscales (Accepting Attitudes – 12 items; Racist Attitudes – 8 items; Ethnocentric Attitudes – 4 items) and a 10-item measure of social desirability. The current chapter summarises the mixed methods approach to the development and evaluation of the novel scale, and reports on the reliability and validity data for children, adolescents, and adults from diverse racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious backgrounds around Australia. The results of examinations of psychometric properties, including latent structure, internal consistency, test-retest reliability, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and predictive validity, are discussed. Utilised analytical techniques include qualitative thematic analysis of interviews and focus groups, unidimensional and multidimensional Rasch (Item Response Theory) analyses, and various Classical Test Theory analyses