Asian American Journal of Psychology, Vol 16(1), Mar 2025, 11-24; doi:10.1037/aap0000363
Asian Americans suffered from heightened amounts of racial prejudice during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although they comprise one of the fastest growing racial minorities in the United States, empirical research on anti-Asian bias has failed to meet the growing needs of the community. Existing measures of racial prejudice tend to focus solely on the perspectives of those who suffer from microaggressions and racism and the psychological or physical harm that results from these encounters. While this research is critical to better serving communities that are harmed from these experiences, it is equally important to explore the attitudes of those who engage in racist behaviors. However, current methods of assessing prejudice are heavily influenced by social desirability response biases; respondents are unlikely to answer self-report questionnaires honestly when it comes to sensitive topics such as racism. To address this issue, this study aimed to create and preliminarily validate a behavior-oriented assessment of racial prejudice known as the East Asian American situational judgment test (EAA-SJT). The item development process was driven by theories on microaggression, and the proposed measurement structure stemmed from psychometric research of situational judgment tests. To provide initial evidence for the validity of the EAA-SJT, a representative sample of 400 participants completed an online survey consisting of multiple measures. An exploratory factor analysis of the EAA-SJT items provided evidence for a three-factor solution categorized into three response types: challenging microaggressions, ambivalence toward microaggressions, and reinforcing microaggressions. Additionally, there was promising evidence for convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)