Perceptions of inequality and intolerance “in the air”: Development and initial validation of the Diversity Climate Scale

Abstract

Diversity climate is associated with numerous outcomes across psychological, physical, and occupational domains. The Diversity Climate Scale (DCS) was created to measure diversity climate perceptions among individuals with diverse and complex social identities, with a range of importance ascribed to those identities, and across diverse contexts (proximal and distal environments). The DCS was constructed and examined across four separate studies. Study 1 presents the development of the scale, preliminary factor structure, and convergent validity. Studies 2 and 3 confirmed the factor structure of the DCS and established the convergent and divergent validity with increasingly generalizable samples. Study 4 extended these analyses with a community sample, examined the predictive validity of the measure, and demonstrated that favorable proximal and distal diversity climate differed significantly across groups with different constellations of marginalized identities and differences in the importance ascribed to those identities. When controlling for lifetime discrimination, perceiving a more positive proximal climate was consistently associated with decreased depressive symptoms and increased life satisfaction, while perceptions of distal climate interacted with proximal climate and discrimination to predict depressive symptoms and life satisfaction. Applications of the DCS and considerations for future research are discussed.