Acculturation Scales: Bidimensional Acculturation Scale for Hispanics

The Bidimensional Acculturation Scale for Hispanics (BAS) was developed in 1996 to provide researchers with a relatively short measure of acculturation that could address the conceptual and psychometric limitations of other acculturation scales. The BAS uses two dimensions to define acculturation, avoiding the faulty assumption that gains in learning a non-Hispanic culture imply losses in the individual's understanding of or preference for Latino culture. As such, the BAS measures respondents' behavioral characteristics in two cultural domains: Hispanic and non-Hispanic. Furthermore, the BAS is useful in research with individuals from all Latino backgrounds rather than with individuals from one subgroup (e.g., Cuban Americans, Mexican Americans).

The BAS was developed by analyzing a large number of items addressing a variety of acculturative areas (e.g., language use, preference for ethnic social events). A random sample of 254 adult Hispanics was asked to report preferences and abilities in 30 areas in which acculturation can have an impact on behavior. Exploratory principal components and factor analyses were conducted on the original responses (separately for language-related items and social behaviors) to identify factors that accounted for large proportions of the variance. The final scale includes items that had correlations greater than .45 with a given factor and did not load heavily in more than one factor.

The BAS includes 24 items measuring linguistic usage, language proficiency, and electronic media usage. Half of the items refer to English use or English-language proficiency, and the other half addresses the same areas as they refer to Spanish use or proficiency. Each of the items is scored on a four point Likert-type scale with anchors of “almost never” (scored as 1) and “almost always” (scored as 4) for the usage-related questions and “very well” (scored as 4) or “very poorly” (scored as 1) for the linguistic proficiency items. The scale produces two acculturation indexes, one for each cultural domain, which are obtained by averaging responses to the 12 items relevant to each cultural domain (range of 1 to 4). An average score close to 1 indicates a low level of cultural proficiency in a given cultural domain (e.g., Latino), whereas an average score close to 4 indicates a high level of cultural proficiency on that same cultural domain. An average score of 2.5 can be used to dichotomize respondents into low or high levels of adherence to the specific cultural domain.

The BAS has shown high levels of reliability and validity. In the original study, the scale showed an alpha coefficient of .87 for the items in the Hispanic domain and .94 for the items in the non-Hispanic domain. Validity was established using a number of approaches, including correlations with respondents' generational status (r = .50 for the non-Hispanic domain and −.42 for the Hispanic domain), length of residence in the United States (r = .46 for the non-Hispanic domain and −.28 for the Hispanic domain), age of arrival in the United States (r = −.60 for the non-Hispanic domain and .41 for the Hispanic domain), and respondents' own assessments of their acculturative status (r = .47 for the non-Hispanic domain and −.38 for the Hispanic domain). In addition, the scale correlated highly (r = .79 for the non-Hispanic domain and −.64 for the Hispanic domain) with the Short Acculturation Scale for Hispanics (SASH).

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