Social Maltreatment and Symptomatology: Validating the Social Discrimination and Maltreatment Scale-Short Form in a Diverse Online Sample.

Abstract

There are few psychometrically valid measures of exposure to social maltreatment that simultaneously assess sexism, racism, and anti-LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other nonheteronormative) behavior, despite the commonness of these phenomena. The Social Discrimination and Maltreatment Scale (SDMS) meets this requirement but is, as a result, somewhat lengthy (36 items). This article introduces a short form of the SDMS containing only half the number of items but generally retaining the psychometric qualities of the original measure. The 18-item Social Discrimination and Maltreatment Scale-Short Form (SDMS-SF) consists of six SDMS stem items (e.g., I have been disrespected, People made cruel or demeaning jokes about me) each of which is rated according to how often it had happened "because of my sex," "because of my race," and "because of my sexual orientation or gender identity." In the SDMS online sample (N = 528), SDMS-SF Sexism, Racism, and Cisheterosexism subscales were validated by confirmatory factor analysis and were internally consistent (α = .91-.95) and highly correlated with the original SDMS subscales (r = .94 in all cases). All SDMS-SF subscales correlated with self-reported anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress (mean r = .29), corresponding to a medium effect size. In all but one instance, related SDMS and SDMS-SF subscales did not differ significantly in the strength of their association with symptomatology. Together, these results suggest that the SDMS-SF is a reliable and valid measure of social discrimination, generally equivalent to the SDMS despite containing only half as many items.