The Assessment of Ethnic Identity in a Diverse Urban Youth Population

This article examines the assessment of ethnic identity in a multiethnic, probability sample of urban adolescents using the Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure (MEIM). The concept of ethnic identity captures the incorporation of ethnicity into self-perception, providing a pivotal link to the social psychological consequences of minority status. A more generalizable psychometric examination of an instrument used extensively in research on African American youth to capture this phenomenon is warranted. This investigation seeks to identify revisions of the MEIM that would render it more useful for interethnic and intraethnic comparisons, utilizing a sample more heterogeneous and representative than those of prior studies. Item and exploratory factor analyses indicate that 10 of 14 items can be combined into a short form (MEIM-S) that measures aspects of this phenomenon that are comparable across ethnic groups, and identify two factors. In general, Whites score significantly lower than African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos, whose scores tend to be similar to one another, consistent with the literature on interethnic variation in the salience of ethnic identity.