Scale of Racial Socialization for Adolescents (SORS-A)

Abstract

The Scale of Racial Socialization for Adolescents (SORS-A) is an influential psychometric instrument developed by Dr. Howard C. Stevenson in 1994 to assess African American adolescents’ perceptions and endorsements of parental and familial messages regarding race, racial identity, and navigating a racially stratified society. Racial socialization is recognized as a vital developmental process that buffers minority youth against the deleterious effects of racial discrimination, fosters cultural resilience, and supports academic and psychological wellbeing. Comprising 45 self-report items evaluated on a 5-point Likert scale (ranging from 1 = Disagree a lot to 5 = Agree a lot), the SORS-A captures multidimensional familial transmissions across core ecological domains. Originally established through exploratory factor analytic procedures, the instrument delineates primary conceptual dimensions: Spiritual and Religious Coping (SRC), Extended Family Caring (EFC), Cultural Pride Reinforcement (CPR), Racism Awareness Teaching (RAT), and Life Achievement and Struggling (LAS).

Psychometric evaluations across diverse urban and community adolescent cohorts demonstrate robust internal consistency reliability (Cronbach's alpha coefficients typically spanning .65 to .85 across subscales and approaching .90 for composite dimensions), stable test-retest reliability, and well-documented construct, convergent, and predictive validity. Scores on the SORS-A correlate predictably with measures of racial identity development (such as Cross's Nigrescence models and the Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity), self-esteem, psychological coping mechanisms, academic persistence, and lower vulnerability to depressive symptomatology and externalizing behavioral problems. This article presents a thorough psychometric and theoretical analysis of the SORS-A, documenting its historical development, underlying theoretical frameworks, structural factor validity, scoring protocols, clinical and educational research applications, and the verbatim 45-item measurement tool.

Keywords

Scale of Racial Socialization for Adolescents, SORS-A, Howard C. Stevenson, racial socialization, African American adolescents, ethnic-racial identity, cultural pride, racism awareness, spiritual coping, extended family kinship, psychometrics, Black psychology

Authors

The Scale of Racial Socialization for Adolescents (SORS-A) was conceptualized, designed, and empirically validated by Howard C. Stevenson, Ph.D. Dr. Stevenson is the Constance Clayton Professor of Urban Education and Professor of Africana Studies in the Human Development and Quantitative Methods Division at the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania. He is also the Executive Director of the Racial Empowerment Collaborative (REC), a clinical research center dedicated to examining and addressing racial literacy, racial trauma, and family socialization dynamics in educational and community environments.

Dr. Stevenson's scholarly trajectory focuses extensively on African American family psychology, urban adolescent development, racial literacy, and community-based interventions. His foundational research in the early 1990s sought to move beyond unidimensional and deficit-oriented assessments of minority youth, introducing standardized psychometric tools to document the culturally specific assets, kinship networks, and protective messaging operationalized within African American households. Beyond the SORS-A, Stevenson developed corresponding instruments including the Scale of Racial Socialization for Parents (SORS-P) and established the Preventing Long-term Anger and Aggression in Youth (PLAAY) intervention program, making enduring contributions to ethnic minority mental health and developmental psychology.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Scale of Racial Socialization for Adolescents (SORS-A) is to operationalize, quantify, and evaluate the specific racial socialization messages that African American adolescents receive from parents, extended family members, and community elders. Prior to the development of the SORS-A, psychological literature on ethnic minority development largely conceptualized socialization through broad, non-specific parenting frameworks (e.g., authoritative versus authoritarian parenting styles) or focused narrowly on racial identity attitudes without assessing the specific pedagogical and communicative mechanisms through which cultural knowledge and coping strategies are imparted.

Developmental theorists emphasize that ethnic minority children in the United States face unique developmental challenges associated with prejudice, institutional inequities, and historical disenfranchisement. Consequently, African American families engage in deliberate, protective parenting practices designed to insulate youth from racial stigma while equipping them to succeed in mainstream societal institutions. Stevenson designed the SORS-A to address several empirical and applied necessities:

• Documenting Multidimensional Protective Messaging: To provide a nuanced assessment that separates distinct socialization facets, such as the proactive instillation of cultural pride from defensive preparation for bias and structural oppression.
• Investigating Developmental and Psychological Correlates: To clarify how varying socialization profiles relate differentially to adolescent mental health outcomes, including self-esteem, depressive symptoms, anxiety, anger regulation, and psychological resilience.
• Evaluating Academic and Educational Adaptation: To evaluate how family messages regarding school dynamics, racial barriers, and academic diligence influence academic self-efficacy, achievement motivation, and school engagement in majority-white versus predominantly Black educational contexts.
• Informing Clinical and Community Interventions: To equip family therapists, school psychologists, and intervention researchers with a diagnostic metric capable of identifying gaps or distress in adolescent racial coping, thereby guiding culturally responsive family therapy and racial literacy interventions.

By assessing both proactive messaging (e.g., ancestral heritage, spiritual resources) and reactive or protective messaging (e.g., vigilance toward racial discrimination, strategies for navigating institutional bias), the SORS-A enables researchers to investigate the complex ecological transactions that characterize Black adolescent development in contemporary society.

Psychological Construct

The overarching psychological construct measured by the SORS-A is racial socialization, conceptualized as the explicit and implicit communications, behavioral modeling, and cultural practices utilized by African American parents, caretakers, and extended kin networks to transmit heritage knowledge, instill racial pride, foster spiritual resilience, and build functional defense mechanisms against pervasive societal racism. Drawing from Black psychology traditions, Stevenson operationalized this construct as multidimensional rather than monolithic, identifying distinct yet interconnected dimensions:

1. Spiritual and Religious Coping (SRC)

The Spiritual and Religious Coping dimension measures adolescent endorsement of theological and spiritual belief systems as fundamental tools for emotional regulation, moral decision-making, and psychological survival against systemic racial oppression. Grounded in the historical role of the Black Church and traditional African cosmologies, this construct reflects the internalization of divine protection, communal worship (in church or mosque), and spiritual combat as primary resilience factors against social injustice (e.g., Item 13: “A belief in God can help a person deal with tough life struggles”; Item 40: “Black children should be taught early that God can protect them from racial hatred”).

2. Extended Family Caring (EFC)

Extended Family Caring captures the structural and functional role of extended kin, intergenerational guidance, and collective community parenting in adolescent socialization. This construct reflects the traditional African American family structure characterized by fictive kin, grandparental decision-making authority, and collective child-rearing practices that distribute emotional and material support across multiple households (e.g., Item 2: “Grandparents help parents to make decisions”; Item 6: “Relatives can help black parents raise their children”; Item 15: “Spending good time with relatives is just as important for parents as it is for their children”).

3. Cultural Pride Reinforcement (CPR)

Cultural Pride Reinforcement assesses parental and familial messages that deliberately affirm African and African American heritage, promote cultural knowledge, foster Black identity development, and advocate for cultural representation in educational curricula. CPR functions proactively to instill a healthy sense of collective self-esteem and cultural connectedness before or alongside experiences of racial discrimination (e.g., Item 17: “Black parents should talk about their roots to African culture to their children”; Item 20: “Schools should be required to teach all children about black history”; Item 23: “Teachers should make it so black children can see signs of black culture in the classroom”).

4. Racism Awareness Teaching (RAT)

Racism Awareness Teaching operationalizes the degree to which adolescents are taught to recognize, anticipate, and critically analyze the presence of racial discrimination, institutional barriers, and interpersonal hostility in society. This dimension includes preparation-for-bias messages and warnings regarding systemic inequities, alongside items evaluating the adolescent's realistic or critical appraisals of fairness in societal structures (e.g., Item 1: “Our society is fair toward black people” [reverse-scored in the context of critical awareness]; Item 37: “Whites do not have more opportunities than blacks”; Item 43: “If black parents teach their children that blacks don't always have the same opportunities as whites, they may help them to survive racism and be successful”).

5. Life Achievement and Struggling (LAS)

Life Achievement and Struggling focuses on familial communications regarding the demanding social and psychological realities required for African American youth to attain upward social mobility. It encompasses messages emphasizing the necessity of dual-world competence (bicultural navigation), disproportionate effort (the “twice as hard” ethos), and the psychological toll of observing familial economic and occupational struggles within a racialized economic structure (e.g., Item 31: “A black child has to work twice as hard in order to get ahead in this world”; Item 35: “Black parents need to teach their children how to live in two worlds: one black and one white”).

Theoretical Framework

The construction and validation of the SORS-A are grounded in several foundational paradigms within developmental psychopathology, African-centered psychology, and ecological systems theory. Principal among these is A. Wade Boykin's Triple Quandary Theory (1983, 1986). Boykin posits that African American life, parenting, and developmental trajectories are simultaneously negotiated within three distinct yet overlapping realms of behavioral and cultural reality:

1. The Mainstream Realm: Participation in the broader, Eurocentric American society, demanding mastery of standard academic, economic, and institutional codes.
2. The Minority Realm: Adaptation to marginalized social status, involving defensive strategies, proactive resistance, and cognitive schemas to navigate systemic racism, stereotyping, and economic oppression.
3. The Afro-Cultural Realm: Immersion in distinct cultural traditions rooted in West African heritage and African American history, emphasizing communalism, spirituality, expressive individualism, and oral tradition.

Stevenson mapped the dimensions of the SORS-A directly onto Boykin's triple quandary framework. Specifically, Cultural Pride Reinforcement and Spiritual and Religious Coping represent adaptations within the Afro-cultural realm; Racism Awareness Teaching reflects navigation within the minority realm; and Life Achievement and Struggling bridges the intersection of mainstream achievement demands and minority survival.

Additionally, the SORS-A integrates Margaret Beale Spencer's Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory (PVEST). PVEST emphasizes that an adolescent's self-appraisal and identity formation represent active coping responses to structural vulnerability and contextual stressors. In Spencer's model, racial socialization operates as a critical protective factor—a cultural asset that influences how youth perceive racial microaggressions and systemic barriers, thereby shaping adaptive versus maladaptive coping outcomes.

Finally, the scale draws upon the racial identity frameworks articulated by William E. Cross Jr. (the Nigrescence model) and Robert Sellers (the Multidimensional Model of Racial Identity). These models posit that racial self-conception is developmental, dynamic, and multifaceted. Socialization messages received during early and middle adolescence serve as primary precursors to racial identity salience, centrality, and ideological development, transitioning youth from unexamined identity states to mature, internalized cultural competence and critical consciousness.

Validity

Extensive empirical investigations provide robust support for the construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of the SORS-A across diverse samples of African American adolescents.

Construct and Factorial Validity

Stevenson's initial validation studies (1994, 1995) established construct validity through principal axis factor analysis and subsequent confirmatory factor analyses. The emergent multi-factor structure demonstrated that adolescent perceptions of racial socialization are empirically distinct from general parental warmth or authoritarian control. The factor solutions consistently supported the separation of proactive cultural transmission (e.g., Cultural Pride, Spirituality) from reactive or defensive transmission (e.g., Racism Awareness, Life Struggling), confirming theoretical assertions that preparing youth for societal hostility does not stem from generalized family distress, but represents a deliberate, specialized socialization modality.

Convergent and Concurrent Validity

Convergent validity has been repeatedly demonstrated through significant correlations with validated instruments assessing racial identity, racial attitudes, and psychological resilience:

• Racial Identity Constructs: Significant positive associations exist between SORS-A subscales (especially CPR and SRC) and the Immersion-Emersion and Internalization stages of Cross's Racial Identity Attitude Scale (RIAS-B), as well as the Racial Centrality and Private Regard subscales of the Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity (MIBI).
• Self-Esteem and Well-being: SORS-A Cultural Pride Reinforcement consistently shows moderate to strong positive correlations with the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale ($r \approx .30$ to $.45, p < .001$), confirming that adolescents who report strong familial validation of their racial heritage maintain higher global self-worth.
• Kinship Support Networks: Stevenson, Reed, and Bodison (1995) established that the Extended Family Caring (EFC) subscale correlates significantly with standardized measures of perceived social support from family and extended kin ($r = .42, p < .001$), demonstrating that the subscale accurately reflects functional intergenerational connectedness.

Discriminant Validity

The SORS-A demonstrates discriminant validity from generalized social desirability and general socio-demographic indicators. While subscales such as Racism Awareness Teaching capture critical appraisals of societal unfairness, they do not correlate significantly with generalized cynical hostility, paranoia, or externalizing conduct disorder when controlling for actual experiences of discrimination. This confirms that high scores on Racism Awareness reflect realistic structural awareness rather than diffuse psychopathological maladjustment.

Predictive and Ecological Validity

The scale exhibits strong predictive utility in developmental and educational research. Longitudinal and cross-sectional studies reveal that high baseline scores on Cultural Pride Reinforcement and Spiritual Coping buffer youth against the psychological distress (e.g., depressive symptoms assessed via the CES-D) precipitated by perceived racial discrimination. Furthermore, in academic contexts, Stevenson (1995, 2002) and subsequent researchers identified that balanced endorsements of Cultural Pride and Racism Awareness predict higher academic self-efficacy, constructive anger-management strategies, and enhanced perseverance in urban educational settings.

Reliability

The psychometric reliability of the SORS-A has been evaluated through internal consistency analyses and stability metrics across various adolescent demographic samples, spanning ages 11 to 18 in middle school, high school, and juvenile community settings.

Internal Consistency

In Stevenson's seminal 1994 validation study involving 285 African American adolescents from urban public and private schools, Cronbach's alpha coefficients for the extracted subscales demonstrated satisfactory to high internal consistency for multidimensional attitudinal scales:

• Spiritual and Religious Coping (SRC): $\alpha = .78$ to $.84$ (reflecting strong item homogeneity around the utility of faith and religious institutions).
• Cultural Pride Reinforcement (CPR): $\alpha = .71$ to $.78$ (indicating robust consistency in messages surrounding African heritage and cultural self-worth).
• Extended Family Caring (EFC): $\alpha = .69$ to $.76$ (demonstrating coherent adolescent reporting of kinship and grandparental involvement).
• Racism Awareness Teaching (RAT): $\alpha = .66$ to $.74$ (satisfactory reliability reflecting the diverse contexts in which bias preparation occurs).
• Life Achievement and Struggling (LAS): $\alpha = .65$ to $.73$.
• Overall Scale Composite: When utilized as a comprehensive index of total racial socialization exposure, the 45-item composite yields an overall Cronbach's alpha spanning $.85$ to $.89$.

Test-Retest Stability

Subsequent psychometric investigations evaluating the temporal stability of the SORS-A across 4- to 8-week intervals reported test-retest correlation coefficients ranging between $r = .72$ and $r = .81$ for the subscales, indicating that adolescent perceptions of family socialization practices remain stable over intermediate developmental periods while retaining sensitivity to longitudinal shifts during adolescent identity transitions.

Factor Analysis

The underlying factor structure of the SORS-A was initially determined by Howard C. Stevenson (1994) using exploratory factor analysis (EFA). The initial pool of items was developed based on ethnographic interviews, adolescent focus groups, and historical literature on Black family life, generating an extensive array of candidate items reflecting familial guidance on race.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Stevenson subjected the 45 items to principal axis factoring followed by both orthogonal (Varimax) and oblique (Promax) rotations to accommodate the theoretical expectation that racial socialization dimensions are correlated. The criteria for factor extraction included eigenvalues greater than 1.5, examination of Cattell's scree test, and conceptual interpretability. Items were retained on specific factors if they exhibited a primary factor loading of $ge .35$ and minimal cross-loadings (difference $> .15$).

The exploratory analyses yielded four dominant primary factors accounting for the majority of the common variance, alongside a salient secondary factor related to achievement struggle:

1. Factor 1: Spiritual and Religious Coping (SRC) accounted for the highest proportion of variance, marked by high loadings from items emphasizing God, prayer, church/mosque attendance, and spiritual warfare (loadings ranging from $.45$ to $.78$).
2. Factor 2: Extended Family Caring (EFC) was defined by items capturing kinship mutual aid, grandparental wisdom, and the collective defense of family well-being (loadings ranging from $.38$ to $.69$).
3. Factor 3: Cultural Pride Reinforcement (CPR) consolidated items focused on African cultural roots, Black history instruction, school cultural displays, and unspoken modeling of racial dignity (loadings ranging from $.40$ to $.72$).
4. Factor 4: Racism Awareness Teaching (RAT) clustered items assessing awareness of societal bias, double standards, lack of fair opportunity, and parental preparation for encountering prejudice (loadings ranging from $.36$ to $.65$).
5. Factor 5: Life Achievement and Struggling (LAS) emerged as an integrative or cross-cutting dimension reflecting the harsh economic and educational realities facing African American youth, notably the imperative to “work twice as hard” and live in “two worlds.”

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

In subsequent structural equation modeling studies (Stevenson, 1995; Stevenson et al., 1996), confirmatory factor analyses supported the multidimensional hierarchical structure of the SORS-A over unidimensional alternatives. Standard goodness-of-fit evaluations revealed acceptable model fit:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI) values consistently ranged between $.90$ and $.93$.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) values approached or exceeded $.90$.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) values ranged from $.048$ to $.062$, with 90% confidence intervals confirming an acceptable error of approximation.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) remained $le .06$.

These structural findings confirmed that adolescent racial socialization is best represented as a correlated multi-factor construct where distinct socialization domains operate synergistically within the family ecological system.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Name: Scale of Racial Socialization for Adolescents (SORS-A)
• Author: Howard C. Stevenson, Ph.D. (1994)
• Instrument Type: Self-report psychometric rating scale
• Target Population: African American and Black adolescents (ages 11–18; grades 6–12)
• Number of Items: 45 items
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire or computerized assessment
• Estimated Completion Time: 15 to 25 minutes
• Response Format: 5-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Disagree a lot
  • 2 = Disagree a little
  • 3 = Not sure
  • 4 = Agree a little
  • 5 = Agree a lot
• Subscale Breakdown & Item Composition:
  • Spiritual and Religious Coping (7 items): Items 4, 7, 13, 21, 22, 28, 40
  • Extended Family Caring (11 items): Items 2, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 24, 27, 30
  • Cultural Pride Reinforcement (9 items): Items 16, 17, 18, 20, 23, 29, 33, 39, 44
  • Racism Awareness Teaching (10 items): Items 1, 3, 19, 26, 30, 37, 38, 41, 42, 45
  • Life Achievement and Struggling (9 items): Items 5, 15, 25, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 44
• Scoring Procedures:
  • Subscale scores are calculated by computing either the sum or the arithmetic mean of the items comprising each specific subscale.
  • Mean subscale scores retain the original 1–5 metric, facilitating direct comparison across subscales of unequal item counts.
  • Items assessing naive or colorblind views of society (e.g., Item 1: “Our society is fair toward black people”; Item 37: “Whites do not have more opportunities than blacks”; Item 38: “A black child or teenager will not be harassed simply because s/he is black”; Item 41: “Whites do not think of black people as lazy or aggressive today…”) are reverse-scored prior to composite aggregation when measuring critical racism awareness and systemic discrimination discernment.
  • A higher score indicates greater adolescent perception and endorsement of that specific racial socialization message within their family and community.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Scale of Racial Socialization for Adolescents (SORS-A) was first published by Dr. Howard C. Stevenson in 1994 in the Journal of Black Psychology (Vol. 20, No. 4, pp. 445–468). It has also been republished and indexed in prominent psychological sourcebooks, including Fischer and Corcoran's Measures for Clinical Practice and Research: A Sourcebook (4th ed., Oxford University Press, 2007).

The instrument is considered an open, non-commercial assessment available for scholarly, clinical, and non-profit educational research purposes. Standard academic convention requires that proper formal citation be provided to Dr. Howard C. Stevenson in any resulting publications, dissertations, or presentations. Researchers seeking to implement the SORS-A in large-scale funded research, intervention protocols, or commercial adaptations should contact the author directly through the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education or the Racial Empowerment Collaborative.

References

• Boykin, A. W. (1983). The academic performance of Afro-American children. In J. T. Spence (Ed.), Achievement and achievement motives: Psychological and sociological approaches (pp. 321–371). W. H. Freeman.
• Boykin, A. W., & Toms, F. D. (1985). Black child socialization: A conceptual framework. In H. P. McAdoo & J. L. McAdoo (Eds.), Black children: Social, educational, and parental environments (pp. 33–51). SAGE Publications.
• Cross, W. E., Jr. (1991). Shades of Black: Diversity in African-American identity. Temple University Press.
• Fischer, J., & Corcoran, K. J. (2007). Measures for clinical practice and research: A sourcebook (4th ed., Vol. 1, pp. 597–599). Oxford University Press.
• Hughes, D., Rodriguez, J., Smith, E. P., Johnson, D. J., Stevenson, H. C., & Spicer, P. (2006). Parents' ethnic-racial socialization practices: A review of research and directions for future study. Developmental Psychology, 42(5), 747–770. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.42.5.747
• Lesane-Brown, C. L. (2006). A review of race socialization within Black families. Developmental Review, 26(4), 400–426. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2006.02.001
• Neblett, E. W., Jr., Philip, C. L., Cogburn, C. D., & Sellers, R. M. (2006). African American adolescents' discrimination experiences and academic achievement: Racial socialization as a cultural protective factor. Journal of Black Psychology, 32(2), 199–218. https://doi.org/10.1177/0095798406287072
• Spencer, M. B. (1995). Old issues and new theorizing about African American youth: A phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory. In R. L. Taylor (Ed.), African American youth: Their social and economic status in the United States (pp. 37–69). Praeger.
• Stevenson, H. C. (1993). Validation of the scale of racial socialization for African American adolescents: A preliminary analysis. Psych Discourse, 24, 12.
• Stevenson, H. C. (1994). Validation of the Scale of Racial Socialization for African American Adolescents: Steps toward multidimensionality. Journal of Black Psychology, 20(4), 445–468. https://doi.org/10.1177/00957984940204005
• Stevenson, H. C. (1995). Relationship of adolescent perceptions of racial socialization to racial identity. Journal of Black Psychology, 21(1), 49–70. https://doi.org/10.1177/00957984950211005
• Stevenson, H. C. (2002). Addressing the racial realities of Black teens: A shape-up model of racial socialization and coping. Journal of Black Psychology, 28(2), 112–137. https://doi.org/10.1177/0095798402028002003
• Stevenson, H. C., Cameron, R., Herrero-Taylor, T., & Davis, G. Y. (2002). Development of the Teenager Experience of Racial Socialization Scale: Correlates of race-related talk to Black youth. Journal of Black Psychology, 28(1), 20–35. https://doi.org/10.1177/0095798402028001003
• Stevenson, H. C., Reed, J., & Bodison, P. (1995). Kinship social support and adolescent perceptions of racial socialization: Extending self to family. Journal of Black Psychology, 22(4), 498–508. https://doi.org/10.1177/0095798496022004005

Items of the Scale