Colonial Mentality Scale

The first psychometric instrument built to measure colonial mentality. Thirty-six items resolving into five factors: within-group discrimination, physical characteristics, colonial debt, cultural shame and embarrassment, and internalized cultural or ethnic inferiority.

The five-factor result is the useful part. It says the thing is not one lump of feeling but several separable ones, which is why a person can carry the shame factor heavily and the colonial debt factor hardly at all. The existence of the scale is itself a piece of evidence: instruments get built when there are enough people carrying something to make the building worth it.

Source: E. J. R. David and Sumie Okazaki (2006), “The Colonial Mentality Scale (CMS) for Filipino Americans: Scale construction and psychological implications,” Journal of Counseling Psychology, 53(2), 241 to 252. Exploratory factor analysis on 292 respondents and confirmatory factor analysis on 311, internet-collected. Paid; free abstract at ERIC, https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ735949 . Validated on Filipino Americans, never on a domestic Philippine sample, and this course states that every time the scale appears.

First used in: 2.5 · The reflex underneath the opinion