Some thoughts on the measurement of acculturation among Mexican American elders

This article examines a subset of acculturation items pertaining to language fluency and use and to interpersonal relationships. This study included 3,050 Mexican American elders aged 65 to 99, randomly sampled from five states in the southwestern United States. A standard acculturation inventory was used as the source for two factor-derived scales that dealt with language and social acculturation. In addition, three other measures were derived on the basis of the acculturation inventory: language and social biculturality scores were created by simple counts of the number of "in-between" scores on the inventory, and an index of neighborhood acculturation was created by computing the average score on the language acculturation factor for each of the 209 primary sampling units used in the sampling frame. The acculturation scales demonstrated reasonable levels of reliability and concurrent validity. Results suggest that multiple approaches to measuring acculturation can be created from existing measures.