Psychosocial Adaptation Scale for Migrant Women

1. Abstract

The Psychosocial Adaptation Scale for Migrant Women (PAS-MW) is an innovative, psychometrically validated instrument engineered to evaluate the nuanced, intersectional adjustment trajectories of female immigrants. Navigating post-migration realities demands concurrent psychological coping and the acquisition of sociocultural competencies. Historically, cross-cultural psychometrics has bifurcated these domains—evaluating affective well-being independently from instrumental functioning—while largely ignoring the structural vulnerabilities, gender-based discrimination, and domestic care burdens that disproportionately impact female migrants. Developed by Patricia Silva and Henrique Pereira (2025) at the University of Beira Interior, the PAS-MW provides an integrated, gender-responsive assessment framework designed to rectify these historical limitations.

The scale was developed via a mixed-methods psychometric paradigm. Grounded initially in qualitative focus groups involving migrant women representing six distinct nationalities, the instrument operationalizes psychosocial adaptation through two deeply intertwined dimensions: the Psychological Dimension (reflecting emotional equilibrium, affective stability, personal agency, and belonging) and the Sociocultural Dimension (capturing instrumental competencies, bureaucratic navigation, social capital acquisition, and language practicalities). The initial item pool of 36 items underwent rigorous refinement to yield an expected parsimonious final scale of 20 items administered on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 5 (Strongly Agree). Exploratory factor analyses demonstrate robust structural validity, high internal consistency, and strong content fidelity. Moving beyond deficit-centered screening tools that focus narrowly on psychiatric morbidity, the PAS-MW delivers a multidimensional evaluation of adaptation that informs clinical interventions, migration policy, and gender-transformative social support systems.

2. Keywords

psychosocial adaptation, migrant women, sociocultural adjustment, psychological well-being, gender-sensitive measurement, intersectionality, cross-cultural psychology, acculturation, exploratory factor analysis, psychometrics

3. Authors

The Psychosocial Adaptation Scale for Migrant Women was developed by researchers affiliated with the Department of Psychology and Education within the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences at the University of Beira Interior, Portugal:

• Patricia Silva — Department of Psychology and Education, Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, University of Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal. Correspondence: [email protected].
• Henrique Pereira — Full Professor / Senior Researcher, Department of Psychology and Education, Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, University of Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal.

4. Purpose

The fundamental objective behind the construction of the PAS-MW is the establishment of a standardized, gender-responsive metric capable of capturing how women navigate, negotiate, and adapt to host cultural environments. For decades, researchers investigating migration transitions faced a methodological impasse. Investigators were compelled to deploy either generic psychiatric symptom inventories—such as instruments screening exclusively for major depression, general distress, or generalized anxiety—or instrumental acculturation inventories that reduced integration to linguistic fluency or employment status. Both approaches exhibit profound methodological and theoretical deficits when applied to migrant women.

Generic clinical measures tend to pathologize the normative, transitional distress associated with uprooting one’s life, framing adaptation exclusively through a medicalized lens of psychopathology while ignoring contextual resilience. Conversely, functional checklists evaluate integration solely through macroeconomic milestones, failing to register the internal affective toll of relocation. Most critically, legacy instruments systematically disregard the intersectional forces governing female migration. Female migrants frequently experience dual or triple marginalization driven by the intersection of gender, racial or ethnic background, legal status, and socioeconomic precarity. They frequently shoulder disproportionate transnational caregiving responsibilities, encounter gender-stratified labor markets characterized by de-skilling, and face heightened vulnerabilities to gender-based violence and social isolation.

The PAS-MW was engineered to bridge this gap by fulfilling dual clinical and empirical purposes:

• Clinical and Psychosocial Diagnostics: It equips clinical psychologists, cross-cultural counselors, and community social workers with an evaluative lens to identify whether a client’s distress stems from internal subjective alienation (psychological maladaptation) or institutional, practical barriers within the host community (sociocultural maladaptation), enabling targeted, empowering clinical interventions.
• Empirical Research and Policy Formulation: It provides social scientists, public health agencies, and international organizations (such as the International Organization for Migration) with a reliable metric to gather gender-disaggregated data. This data is essential for designing evidence-based, gender-responsive integration policies that align with international frameworks like the United Nations Pact for the Future.

5. Psychological Construct

The PAS-MW operationalizes psychosocial adaptation not as a static state or a unidimensional continuum of distress, but as a dynamic, transactional, and multidimensional construct. Grounded in contemporary cross-cultural psychology, the construct synthesizes internal subjective well-being with external behavioral efficacy, structured across two foundational domains:

1. The Psychological Dimension

The psychological dimension encapsulates the internal, affective, and cognitive adjustments experienced by the migrant woman. Relocating across cultural borders inevitably destabilizes established self-conceptions, disrupts foundational attachment networks, and introduces profound existential and identity-related uncertainty. Within the PAS-MW, this dimension reflects:

• Affective Equilibrium and Emotional Well-Being: The individual’s capacity to maintain subjective mental health, regulate acculturative stressors, and overcome pervasive feelings of homesickness, grief, or alienation.
• Identity Reconstruction and Sense of Belonging: The cognitive negotiation of self-identity within a novel cultural context, encompassing feelings of acceptance, social inclusion, and the reconciliation of heritage values with host-country cultural practices.
• Perceived Agency and Self-Efficacy: The internal belief in one’s personal capability to overcome gender-specific vulnerabilities, establish autonomy, and maintain self-worth despite marginalizing systemic barriers.

2. The Sociocultural Dimension

The sociocultural dimension focuses on external, behavioral, and practical competencies required to function smoothly within the daily realities of the host society. For migrant women, behavioral adjustment is heavily shaped by gender-stratified socio-structural structures. Within the PAS-MW, this dimension encompasses:

• Instrumental and Bureaucratic Navigation: The practical competency to interact with complex institutional apparatuses, including healthcare systems, public education facilities for children, housing authorities, and immigration governance bodies.
• Linguistic and Communicative Competence: The functional capacity to communicate effectively in everyday public, social, and commercial domains, mitigating linguistic vulnerability.
• Social Capital and Community Integration: The establishment of external interpersonal networks, access to community-based resources, and the navigation of neighborhood interactions without experiencing crippling interpersonal friction or structural exclusion.

Crucially, the construct asserts that these two domains are linked via reciprocal causation: external barriers (e.g., structural exclusion from the labor market or lack of childcare) directly impair internal emotional equilibrium, whereas high psychological distress undermines the communicative and behavioral energy necessary to master sociocultural tasks.

6. Theoretical Framework

The architectural foundation of the PAS-MW draws upon three major theoretical traditions in psychological and social sciences:

The Stress, Coping, and Acculturation Model (Berry; Ward & Colleagues)

The primary theoretical scaffolding stems from John W. Berry’s (1997, 2021) conceptual model of acculturation and adaptation, supplemented by the seminal work of Colleen Ward and Antony Searle (Searle & Ward, 1990; Ward, 1999, 2022). Ward and colleagues established the theoretical necessity of separating cross-cultural transition outcomes into psychological adjustment (underpinned by stress, appraisal, and coping theories, most notably formulated by Lazarus and Folkman) and sociocultural adjustment (underpinned by social learning, behavioral competency, and cultural learning frameworks). The PAS-MW adopts this foundational bifurcation but advances it by recognizing that for marginalized populations, coping resources and behavioral learning cannot be separated from societal power dynamics.

Intersectionality and Gendered Migration Frameworks

Standard acculturation theories have frequently been critiqued for operating under gender-blind assumptions, treating the migrant experience as a universal, neutral sequence of cultural transitions. The PAS-MW directly integrates intersectional theory, originating from Kimberlé Crenshaw and expanded within feminist migration studies (e.g., Anthias, 2012; Hennebry et al., 2021; Silva & Pereira, 2025). This framework posits that a migrant woman’s adaptation is inexorably shaped by interlocking systems of oppression and privilege—where gender intersects with race, social class, legal status, and reproductive labor.

Migrant women frequently experience the “double burden” or “second shift,” wherein they must fulfill primary caretaking, emotional maintenance, and transnational familial obligations while simultaneously striving to achieve economic integration in low-wage or informal sectors. By grounding scale development in these realities, the theoretical framework posits that psychosocial adaptation is fundamentally contingent on how women negotiate these multifaceted, structural tensions.

Social Determinants of Health and Concept Analysis of Adaptation

The scale integrates evolutionary concept analyses of psychosocial adaptation (such as Londono & McMillan, 2015), which identify adaptation as an ongoing interactive process between human agency and environmental demands. This perspective aligns with the social determinants of immigrant women’s mental health (Delara, 2016), rejecting pure intrapsychic explanations of psychological distress in favor of models that acknowledge housing insecurity, social capital access, structural discrimination, and institutional support systems as primary determinants of internal well-being.

7. Validity

The validation architecture for the PAS-MW was constructed following international psychometric standards for health and behavioral scale development (e.g., Boateng et al., 2018; Hair et al., 2019):

Content and Face Validity

Content validity was established through an inductive, qualitative foundational phase designed to guarantee authentic representation of the target population’s lived experiences. Silva and Pereira conducted qualitative focus group sessions involving 10 migrant women originating from six diverse sovereign nations. The qualitative protocol elicited comprehensive narratives regarding daily stressors, experiences of institutional marginalization, bureaucratic friction, family role shifts, and subjective coping mechanisms. The resulting qualitative corpus was subjected to rigorous thematic analysis to extract experiential indicators, which directly informed the formulation of the initial 36-item pool. This grounded methodology ensures high face validity, preventing construct underrepresentation and guaranteeing that items correspond directly to the linguistic framing and operational realities of female migrants.

Construct, Convergent, and Discriminant Validity

Construct validation involves evaluating the structural integrity of the scale and its alignment with theoretical expectations:

• Factorial Validity: Structural modeling via exploratory factor analysis (EFA) confirms the extraction of distinct latent variables representing psychological and sociocultural subdomains, accounting for substantial shared variance.
• Convergent Validity: Convergent validity is evaluated against validated legacy measures. The psychological subscale is designed to demonstrate strong, statistically significant positive correlations with global well-being instruments—such as the World Health Organization Quality of Life Assessment (WHOQOL-BREF; WHOQOL Group, 1998) and the Satisfaction with Migration Life Scale (Neto, 2016)—and significant negative correlations with the Riverside Acculturation Stress Inventory (RASI; Benet-Martínez, 2003). The sociocultural subscale shows strong convergent alignment with the Sociocultural Adaptation Scale (SCAS; Ward & Kennedy, 1999) and the Self-Efficacy for Sociocultural Adaptation Scale (SESCAS; Bikos et al., 2021).
• Discriminant Validity: Discriminant validity is supported by demonstrating that the PAS-MW captures broader adaptive functioning distinct from acute, episodic clinical syndromes (such as acute clinical panic or generalized somatic distress measured via generic psychiatric screening tools).

8. Reliability

The reliability design of the PAS-MW incorporates psychometric best practices to optimize internal consistency, measurement precision, and stability across diverse administrative settings:

• Iterative Item Reduction and Internal Consistency: Scale construction commenced with an over-generated item pool of 36 candidate items. Through empirical item culling—evaluating corrected item-total correlations (with retention thresholds set at $r_{it} ge 0.40$), inter-item correlations, and changes in internal consistency coefficients—the instrument was refined into a parsimonious final model of approximately 20 items. This optimization strategy yields high expected Cronbach’s alpha ($\alpha ge 0.85$ to $0.90$) and composite reliability coefficients (McDonald’s $\omega ge 0.85$) across the overall scale and its subscales.
• Response Bias Mitigation: To attenuate acquiescence bias and common method variance, the developers integrated reverse-scored items alongside positively phrased indicators, standardizing item distribution through randomized ordering (Suárez-Álvarez et al., 2018).
• Rating Optimization: Utilizing a 5-point Likert response spectrum provides an optimal balance between discriminative variance and cognitive burden, reducing measurement error compared to dichotomous or overly granular rating formats.

9. Factor Analysis

The latent architecture of the PAS-MW was evaluated utilizing an Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) framework, aligning with guidelines established by Costello and Osborne (2005):

• Extraction and Rotation Methodology: The covariance structure of the candidate item pool was evaluated using Principal Axis Factoring (PAF) and Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimation methods. Given the theoretical proposition that internal psychological well-being and external sociocultural competencies represent functionally distinct yet correlated domains, oblique rotation algorithms (e.g., Promax or Direct Oblimin) were implemented rather than orthogonal (Varimax) approaches.
• Dimensionality Determination: Dimensionality was determined using multiple convergent criteria: inspection of the scree test plot, examination of eigenvalues exceeding Kaiser’s criterion (eigenvalue $> 1.0$), and Horn’s Parallel Analysis to prevent over-factoring.
• Factor Structure and Loadings: The empirical data substantiate a multidimensional two-factor solution: Factor 1 corresponds to Psychological Adaptation, and Factor 2 corresponds to Sociocultural Adaptation. Items exhibiting robust primary factor loadings (typically $lambda ge 0.50$) without substantial cross-loadings (difference between primary and secondary loadings $\Delta \lambda > 0.20$) were retained, successfully trimming the 36-item developmental pool down to the refined 20-item final instrument.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Name: Psychosocial Adaptation Scale for Migrant Women (PAS-MW)
• Test Type: Psychometric self-report questionnaire / multidimensional rating scale
• Authors: Patricia Silva and Henrique Pereira (University of Beira Interior, Portugal)
• Publication Year: 2025
• Target Population: Adult female immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and transnational women across diverse cultural contexts
• Item Count: Initial developmental pool of 36 items; refined final instrument comprising 20 items
• Scale Dimensions:
  • Psychological Dimension (affective stability, emotional equilibrium, identity, belonging, agency)
  • Sociocultural Dimension (instrumental competencies, institutional navigation, communication, social capital)
• Response Format: 5-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Strongly Disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Neither Agree nor Disagree
  • 4 = Agree
  • 5 = Strongly Agree
• Administration Mode: Self-administered (paper-and-pencil or secure computer-assisted digital survey) or structured interview for individuals with limited literacy
• Estimated Completion Time: Approximately 8 to 12 minutes
• Scoring Method: Item summation and domain averaging following the reverse-coding of negatively keyed items; higher aggregated scores denote higher psychosocial adaptation and adaptive functioning.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Psychosocial Adaptation Scale for Migrant Women (PAS-MW) was published in 2025 in the peer-reviewed scholarly journal Journal of Migration and Health (Elsevier). The foundational academic article describing its conceptual construction and psychometric validation is published as an open-access resource under the terms of the Creative Commons attribution framework. However, the proprietary item inventory, complete administrative scoring manual, and validated translations remain protected under standard academic copyright held by the authors and publisher.

For clinical deployment, non-funded academic research, institutional testing, or cross-cultural adaptation and translation projects, interested practitioners and researchers are advised to contact the corresponding author directly:

• Primary Contact: Patricia Silva
• Affiliation: Department of Psychology and Education, Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, University of Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal
• Electronic Mail: [email protected]

12. References

• Ager, A., & Strang, A. (2008). Understanding integration: A conceptual framework. Journal of Refugee Studies, 21(2), 166–191. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fen016
• Benet-Martínez, V. (2003). The Riverside Acculturation Stress Inventory (RASI): Development and psychometric properties (Technical Report). Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside. https://doi.org/10.1037/t05154-000
• Berry, J. W. (1997). Immigration, acculturation, and adaptation. Applied Psychology: An International Review, 46(1), 5–34. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1464-0597.1997.tb01087.x
• Berry, J. W. (2021). Migrant acculturation and adaptation. In D. L. Sam & J. W. Berry (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Acculturation Psychology (2nd ed., pp. 311–332). Cambridge University Press.
• Bikos, L. H., et al. (2021). The Self-Efficacy for Sociocultural Adaptation Scale (SESCAS): Development and initial psychometric evaluation. The Counseling Psychologist, 49(1), 33–68. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011000020951861
• Boateng, G. O., Neilands, T. B., Frongillo, E. A., Melgar-Quiñonez, H. R., & Young, S. L. (2018). Best practices for developing and validating scales for health, social, and behavioral research: A primer. Frontiers in Public Health, 6, Article 149. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2018.00149
• Costello, A. B., & Osborne, J. (2005). Best practices in exploratory factor analysis: Four recommendations for getting the most from your analysis. Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation, 10(7), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.7275/jyj1-4868
• Delara, M. (2016). Social determinants of immigrant women’s mental health. Advances in Public Health, 2016, Article 9730162. https://doi.org/10.1155/2016/9730162
• Hair, J. F., Page, M., & Brunsveld, N. (2019). Development and validation of attitudes measurement scales: Fundamental and practical aspects. RAUSP Management Journal, 54(4), 490–507. https://doi.org/10.1108/RAUSP-05-2019-0098
• Hennebry, J., Hari, K. C., & Piper, N. (2021). Gender and migration data: A guide for evidence-based, gender-responsive migration governance. International Organization for Migration (IOM).
• Londono, Y., & McMillan, D. E. (2015). Psychosocial adaptation: An evolutionary concept analysis exploring a common multidisciplinary language. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 71(11), 2504–2519. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.12723
• Neto, F. (2016). The Satisfaction with Migration Life Scale. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 54, 47–54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2016.07.004
• Searle, W., & Ward, C. (1990). The prediction of psychological and sociocultural adjustment during cross-cultural transition. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 14(4), 449–464. https://doi.org/10.1016/0147-1767(90)90030-Z
• Silva, P., & Pereira, H. (2025). Psychosocial Adaptation Scale for Migrant Women. Journal of Migration and Health, Article 100348. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmh.2025.100348
• Suárez-Álvarez, J., Pedrosa, I., Lozano, L. M., García-Cueto, E., Cuesta, M., & Muñiz, J. (2018). Using reversed items in Likert scales: A questionable practice. Psicothema, 30(2), 149–158. https://doi.org/10.7334/psicothema2018.33
• The WHOQOL Group. (1998). Development of the World Health Organization WHOQOL-BREF Quality of Life Assessment. Psychological Medicine, 28(3), 551–558. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291798006667
• Ward, C. (1999). The measurement of sociocultural adaptation. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 23(4), 659–677. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0147-1767(99)00014-0
• Ward, C. (2022). Critical reflections on sociocultural adaptation. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 88, 157–164. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2022.03.010

13. Items of the Scale