Domain-Specific Diversity Model Scales

1. Abstract

The Domain-Specific Diversity Model Scales (Konings, Ağirdağ, & De Leersnyder, 2023) constitute an advanced psychometric instrument developed to assess educational practitioners’ perceptions of institutional approaches to ethnic-cultural diversity. Built upon the theoretical framework of the School Diversity Model (SDM; Plaut, 2010), this instrument operationalizes three overarching diversity ideologies—namely assimilationism, color-blindness, and pluralism—across four distinct school-based functional domains: language, religion, curriculum, and identity. Item content was constructed through an exhaustive systematic synthesis of existing psychometric inventories (e.g., Byrd, 2015; Chen & Starosta, 2000) and supplemented by newly derived items, translated between English and Dutch via rigorous back-translation methodologies.

The resulting 47-item instrument was empirically tested and validated among a representative cohort of Flemish pre-service and in-service teachers in Belgium. Structural equation modeling (SEM) alongside exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) revealed a differentiated, multi-faceted factor structure. While pluralism demonstrated relevance across all four domains, assimilationism was reliably identified across three domains (excluding curriculum), and color-blindness manifested predominantly within curriculum practices. Cronbach’s alpha internal consistency coefficients for the subscales ranged from acceptable to excellent (α = .651 to .932). Construct and criterion-related validity were corroborated by meaningful, domain-dependent associations with educators’ personal diversity attitudes, educational beliefs, multicultural pedagogical knowledge, and teacher self-efficacy, establishing the instrument as a reliable tool for educational research and institutional assessment.

2. Keywords

Ethnic-Cultural Diversity, School Diversity Model, Teacher Perceptions, Assimilationism, Pluralism, Color-Blindness, Multicultural Education, Critical Consciousness Socialization, Interculturalism, Educational Measurement

3. Authors

The Domain-Specific Diversity Model Scales were conceptualized, operationalized, and psychometrically validated by researchers affiliated with the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences at KU Leuven, Belgium:

• Roy Konings — Center for Sociological Research / Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium. (ORCID: 0000-0003-4501-0504; Email: [email protected])
• Orhan Ağirdağ — Laboratory for Education and Society, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, and University of Amsterdam, Netherlands.
• Jozefien De Leersnyder — Center for Social and Cultural Psychology, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.

Correspondence regarding the instrument, adaptation rights, and implementation guidelines should be directed to Roy Konings.

4. Purpose

Educational institutions across the globe are increasingly tasked with addressing pervasive socio-demographic transformations driven by immigration, globalization, and ethnocultural diversification. In response, schools cultivate structural approaches, educational practices, and organizational norms that reflect implicit or explicit diversity ideologies. Historically, psychological and educational research has evaluated these approaches globally, assessing school diversity climate as an overarching, undifferentiated construct. However, broad global assessments often fail to capture the nuanced, domain-dependent realities of institutional practice. A school may simultaneously implement a highly pluralistic policy toward cultural identity while enforcing strict assimilationist mandates regarding linguistic practices. The primary purpose of the Domain-Specific Diversity Model Scales is to address this methodological limitation by providing a reliable, granular measurement system that captures educators’ perceptions of diversity practices across concrete operational areas.

The instrument measures teachers’ observations of how their school environment handles three foundational cultural diversity models—assimilationism, color-blindness, and pluralism—across four fundamental domains of daily school life: language policies, religious practices, curricular content, and identity negotiation. By assessing diversity practices within specific spheres of schooling, the scale enables researchers and administrative leaders to identify nuanced policy mismatches, pedagogical contradictions, and targeted areas in need of reform.

In applied and academic contexts, this measurement tool fulfills multiple diagnostic and investigative functions:

• Empirical Research: Facilitates rigorous sociological and educational psychology investigations into how specific domain policies affect minority student outcomes, intergroup prejudice, and academic engagement.
• School Self-Evaluation and Audit: Serves as a diagnostic tool for school administrators, leadership teams, and diversity officers aiming to audit their climate and benchmark current institutional norms against desired pedagogical models.
• Teacher Training and Professional Development: Employs domain-specific feedback to assist pre-service and in-service educators in cultivating critical reflection regarding their personal classroom management, language policing, curriculum design, and implicit biases.

5. Psychological Construct

The Domain-Specific Diversity Model Scales measure cultural diversity models through an intersectional matrix that crosses theoretical diversity ideologies with institutional functioning domains. The primary ideological dimensions and domain intersections include:

1. Assimilationism

Assimilationism reflects the ideological assumption that societal harmony, equity, and civic coherence require minority and immigrant students to shed their heritage ethnic markers, languages, and cultural customs in favor of conforming to dominant mainstream norms. In the educational environment, assimilationist practices prioritize cultural homogeneity. Within this scale, assimilationism is assessed across three primary functional areas:

• Assimilationism in Language: Institutional policies, disciplinary codes, and instructional norms that prohibit or penalize the use of home languages, dialects, or native vernaculars, enforcing monolingual standard-language compliance within classrooms and communal school grounds.
• Assimilationism in Religion: Expectations that students minimize or abandon visible religious markers, rituals, dietary observances, or holidays to mirror a dominant secular or historic religious norm.
• Assimilationism in Identity: Institutional pressure placed on ethnocultural minority students to adopt standard mainstream behavioral scripts, identities, and nationalistic affiliations as a prerequisite for institutional inclusion.

2. Color-Blindness

The color-blind ideology posits that individual differences should be emphasized while group-based categorizations—such as race, ethnicity, or cultural background—should be systematically ignored or downplayed. In educational institutions, color-blindness is often implemented with egalitarian intentions under the assumption that ignoring ethnic distinctions prevents discrimination. However, empirical literature suggests that color-blind practices frequently delegitimize minority lived experiences and sustain existing systemic inequities. In this instrument’s finalized structure, color-blindness emerged reliably within:

• Color-Blindness in Curriculum: Instructional design and learning resources that deliberately avoid discussing cultural, ethnic, or racial histories, framing learning materials exclusively around universal, ethnically neutral narratives that bypass structural racism and sociocultural differences.

3. Pluralism (Multiculturalism and Interculturalism)

Pluralism rejects both forced conformity and the erasure of cultural distinctions, instead conceptualizing ethnic-cultural diversity as a vital educational and social asset. Within this instrument, pluralism represents a multidimensional construct spanning all four school domains and further differentiating into several sub-dimensions:

• Pluralism in Language: Legitimizing, valuing, and incorporating multilingualism and students’ home languages into learning processes and the school linguistic landscape.
• Pluralism in Religion: Accommodating religious diversity through inclusive dietary provisions, recognition of multi-faith holy days, and respecting religious attire and practices.
• Pluralism in Curriculum: Integrating diverse ethnic, historical, and cultural perspectives into standard teaching curricula, encompassing both critical consciousness socialization (interrogating power dynamics, systemic inequality, and historical injustice) and basic cultural representation.
• Pluralism in Identity: Encouraging hybrid, hyphenated, and dual-cultural self-definitions among students, actively supporting students in retaining their heritage cultural identities alongside their institutional participation (participation-multiculturalism).

6. Theoretical Framework

The scale is theoretically grounded in the School Diversity Model (SDM) introduced by Victoria C. Plaut (2010), alongside broader cross-cultural and intergroup psychology frameworks developed by researchers such as John Berry, Rupert Brown, and Maykel Verkuyten. Plaut’s model posits that institutional diversity models shape the psychological climate of organizations, dictating normative expectations for how difference is perceived, evaluated, and negotiated.

Historical Trajectories of Diversity Ideologies

For decades, social psychological literature juxtaposed assimilationist models against multiculturalist frameworks. Assimilationism, rooted in mid-twentieth-century functionalist sociology, viewed cultural difference as an obstacle to civic cohesion and academic achievement. Under assimilationist paradigms, institutional success was defined by the speed at which immigrant and minority populations adopted majority norms. In contrast, multicultural theories posited that group identification is psychologically fundamental; recognizing and validating group identities yields greater psychological well-being, belonging, and academic resilience among minoritized students.

Concurrently, the color-blind paradigm emerged as an alternative approach aimed at transcending group bias by emphasizing universal humanity and individual meritocracy. However, extensive experimental and field research demonstrated that color-blind environments frequently hinder minority students by minimizing systemic obstacles and rendering structural discrimination unmentionable.

The Domain-Specific Turn in Educational Contexts

Konings, Ağirdağ, and De Leersnyder (2023) challenged the prevailing assumption that an educational institution operates under a singular, uniform diversity model. Drawing from sociolinguistic research, religious studies, and multicultural education theories (e.g., Banks, 2015; Byrd, 2015), they argued that educational settings consist of distinct institutional arenas governed by unique legislative, historical, and pedagogical traditions:

• The Linguistic Arena: Historically subjected to severe nation-building pressures, where language standardization and monolingual ideologies remain strongly entrenched.
• The Religious Arena: Governed by national frameworks of state-church relations, secularism, or institutional neutrality, leading to different regulatory standards compared to general cultural celebrations.
• The Pedagogical/Curricular Arena: Constrained by official state curricula, educational testing benchmarks, and instructional autonomy.
• The Relational/Identity Arena: Shaped by interpersonal dynamics, social belonging, teacher-student relationships, and informal peer interactions.

By mapping SDM diversity ideologies onto these structural arenas, the Domain-Specific Diversity Model Scales establish a psychometric framework capable of capturing institutional inconsistencies, such as schools that champion curriculum multiculturalism while enforcing strict linguistic assimilationism.

7. Validity

The construct, convergent, and discriminant validity of the Domain-Specific Diversity Model Scales were validated through advanced statistical methods, primarily Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) conducted on a diverse sample of Flemish in-service and pre-service educators in Belgium.

Construct and Structural Validity

Construct validity was demonstrated by evaluating the fit of the theoretical domain-specific conceptual model against observed empirical data. Confirmatory factor analysis verified that treating diversity ideologies across separate operational domains yielded a significantly superior representation of empirical reality compared to single-factor or broad, domain-general conceptualizations. When testing a second-order model (wherein specific domain practices served as first-order factors loading onto overarching diversity models), the Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) evidenced good fit, and all standardized factor loadings were statistically significant and uniformly robust (standardized coefficients ≥ .484).

Convergent and Criterion Validity

Criterion and convergent validity were established by examining the instrument’s associations with established psychological and pedagogical measures:

• Personal and Educational Diversity Beliefs: Teachers’ self-reported assimilationist beliefs positively correlated with perceived institutional assimilationist practices across language, religion, and identity domains. Conversely, teachers endorsing multicultural beliefs reported higher levels of perceived pluralism across curriculum, language, identity, and religious domains.
• Multicultural Teaching Knowledge: Educators demonstrating higher self-reported knowledge of multicultural pedagogical strategies perceived significantly higher levels of pluralistic curricular practices and critical consciousness socialization within their schools.
• Teacher Self-Efficacy: Teachers’ perceived self-efficacy in managing culturally heterogeneous classrooms was positively associated with institutional pluralistic practices and negatively or non-significantly related to strict institutional assimilationist practices.

Empirical Validation of the Domain-Specific Rationale

Crucially, confirming the authors’ primary hypothesis, the empirical correlations between diversity models and educational outcomes differed meaningfully depending on the specific domain evaluated. For instance, assimilationist policies in the linguistic domain demonstrated distinct behavioral correlates compared to assimilationist expectations regarding student identity or religious expression. This empirical differentiation provides strong evidence for the criterion validity of a domain-specific measurement approach over global assessment tools.

8. Reliability

The Domain-Specific Diversity Model Scales demonstrated robust internal consistency across its various dimensions, as evidenced by empirical testing in Flemish educational environments.

Internal Consistency Reliability

Reliability was assessed using Cronbach’s alpha (α) across all first-order and sub-dimensional factor constructs. The observed alpha values spanned from acceptable to excellent:

• Overall Range: Observed Cronbach’s alpha values across all 47 items and distinct domain-specific subscales ranged from .651 to .932.
• Pluralism Subscales: Displayed high to very high internal consistency across all four functional areas (typically α > .80), including sub-dimensions such as critical consciousness socialization and participation-multiculturalism.
• Assimilationism Subscales: Demonstrated strong internal consistency across the language, religion, and identity domains, with reliability coefficients exceeding standard psychometric thresholds for research instruments (α ≥ .75).
• Curricular Color-Blindness: Yielded stable internal consistency within its specialized curricular factor.

All standardized factor loadings remained consistently above the psychometric threshold of .40, with no item falling below .484, indicating that the individual items share substantial common variance with their designated theoretical constructs. Test-retest reliability and longitudinal invariance across repeated administrative waves remain an active area for ongoing and future research.

9. Factor Analysis

The psychometric structure of the 47-item instrument was identified and confirmed using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

EFA was conducted to examine the empirical dimensional alignment of items across diversity models and functional domains. The exploratory analysis yielded key empirical insights:

• Assimilationism: Items reliably clustered into three distinct domain factors: Language, Religion, and Identity. Items originally designed to capture assimilationist curriculum policies did not separate into an independent factor, as assimilationist curricular dynamics were largely subsumed under broader linguistic and identity expectations.
• Color-Blindness: Color-blind items loaded cleanly onto a specific factor limited to the Curriculum domain, representing the active avoidance of racial, cultural, and ethnic topics in teaching. Color-blind items across other domains lacked unique empirical variance separate from assimilationist or low-pluralism markers.
• Pluralism: The pluralistic dimension demonstrated the broadest empirical applicability, emerging consistently across all four domains: Language, Religion, Curriculum, and Identity. Furthermore, pluralistic items within curriculum and identity further split into theoretically meaningful sub-factors: Critical Consciousness Socialization, Participation-Multiculturalism, and Interculturalism.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

To confirm this structure, the authors modeled a second-order factor architecture in which the distinct domain-specific scales served as first-order latent constructs loading onto broader second-order School Diversity Models (SDMs). Key model fit metrics and structural parameters include:

• Standardized Factor Loadings: All item and first-order factor loadings were statistically significant (p < .001) and substantial, ranging from a minimum of .484 to over .90.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Indicated good overall fit to the empirical data, falling well within standard accepted thresholds (≤ .06).
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): While the overall fit reached mostly satisfactory levels across fit indices, the SRMR slightly exceeded the stringent conventional cut-off threshold of .08 in the second-order model, suggesting that certain residual covariances among specific domain practices warrant continued refinement in future cross-cultural replications.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Type: Standardized psychometric rating scale / Teacher perception inventory.
• Theoretical Basis: School Diversity Model (SDM; Plaut, 2010); Multidimensional domain-specific diversity model.
• Total Item Count: 47 items.
• Format & Response Scale: 5-point Likert-type response scale ranging from:
• 1 = Absolutely not true
• 2 = Mostly not true
• 3 = Neutral / Moderately true
• 4 = Mostly true
• 5 = Absolutely true
• Administration Modality: Electronic survey (computer, tablet, or web browser) or self-administered paper-and-pencil questionnaire.
• Target Population: In-service primary and secondary educators, pre-service teacher candidates, school administrators, and educational specialists.
• Language Availability: Dutch (original validation language) and English (formal back-translated research version).
• Functional Domains Assessed (4):
• Language: Institutional linguistic rules, multilingual tolerance, and home-language validation.
• Religion: Religious dress, holiday accommodations, and dietary adjustments.
• Curriculum: Educational content, representation of diversity, and critical structural socialization.
• Identity: Belonging norms, peer dynamics, and expectations of cultural retention vs. cultural shedding.
• Core Latent Factors & Diversity Models (8 sub-dimensions):
• Multiculturalism
• Interculturalism
• Participation-Multiculturalism
• Critical Consciousness Socialization
• Color-Blindness (Curriculum)
• Assimilationism (Language)
• Assimilationism (Religion)
• Assimilationism (Identity / Assimilation Rules)
• Scoring Guidelines: Subscale scores are calculated by averaging item responses within each domain-ideology dimension. Higher mean scores indicate a greater perceived presence of that specific diversity approach within the school environment. Reversed items, where applicable, are inverted prior to composite score calculation.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Domain-Specific Diversity Model Scales were published in 2023 by researchers Roy Konings, Orhan Ağirdağ, and Jozefien De Leersnyder. The instrument is intended for non-commercial academic, psychological, and institutional evaluation research. No licensing fees are required for scholarly use.

Researchers, school systems, and practitioners interested in using, translating, or adapting the instrument for non-commercial empirical research or institutional audits must contact the corresponding author to obtain permission, administrative guidance, and the complete scoring rubric:

• Corresponding Author: Roy Konings
• Institutional Affiliation: Center for Sociological Research, KU Leuven, Belgium
• Email: [email protected]
• Commercial Use: Prohibited without formal written consent from the author team and KU Leuven.

12. References

Banks, J. A. (2015). Cultural diversity and education: Foundations, curriculum, and teaching (6th ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315622255

Brislin, R. W. (1970). Back-translation for cross-cultural research. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 1(3), 185–216. https://doi.org/10.1177/135910457000100301

Byrd, C. M. (2015). The associations of interethnic interactions and school racial climate with cultural competence. The Journal of Educational Research, 108(6), 509–522. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2014.918059

Chen, G. M., & Starosta, W. Y. (2000). The development and validation of the Intercultural Sensitivity Scale. Human Communication, 3, 2–14.

Konings, R., Ağirdağ, O., & De Leersnyder, J. (2023). School diversity models revisited: A plea and first evidence for a domain specific approach. Social Psychology of Education: An International Journal, 26(4), 1127–1179. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-023-09784-0

Plaut, V. C. (2010). Diversity science: Why and how everyone should be sensitive to diversity. Social Issues and Policy Review, 4(1), 168–209. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-2409.2010.01021.x

13. Items of the Scale