Reliability
Internal Consistency
In Study 1, the four items were asked of each grandparent, paternal and maternal, and all exhibited Cronbach
alpha coefficients: paternal grandfather, α5.76; paternal grandmother, α5.80; maternal grandfather, α5.72;
maternal grandmother, α5.72. In Study 2, the scale yielded an alpha coefficient ( α5.72).
Test/C0Retest
No evidence is currently available for test /C0retest reliability.
Validity
Convergent/Concurrent
In Study 1, Harwood et al. (2005) reported that their four measures of g roup salience correlated signifi-
cantly with each other (.27 ,r,.59). These correlations are strong en ough to demonstrate good convergent
validity, but are not too strong to raise concerns th at they measure an overall ‘salience’ construct.
Furthermore, correlations between salience measures were stronger within lineage ties (i.e., correlations
between salience scores for paternal and maternal gra ndfather and grandmother were .58 and .59, respec-
tively) than they were between lineage ties (the corre lation between paternal grandmother and maternal
grandfather, for example, was .29).
Divergent/Discriminant
Group salience is only hypothesized t o influence the relationship between contact and attitudes and is not
hypothesized to influence attitudes its elf. Therefore, the non-significant correlations between group salience
and outgroup attitudes ( r5/C0.18) and perceived variability ( r5/C0.10) reported in Study 2 provide evidence for
divergent validity. The correlation between intergr oup contact and salience was small, but significant
(r5/C0.25, Study 2).
Construct/Factor Analytic
Soliz and Harwood (2006) used the four salience items ( N5369 American university students) in a study
investigating communicative and relational facets of the grandchild /C0grandparent relationship. The authors par-
celled the four-item salience measure into two parcels and entered them into a CFA. Across two CFAs, the
authors found that the salience parcels loaded strongly and significantly onto the designated latent variable (fac-
tor loadings ranging between .80 and .83).
Location
H a r w o o d ,J . ,H e w s t o n e ,M . ,P a o l i n i ,S . ,&V o c i ,A .( 2 0 0 5 ) .G r a n d p a r e n t /C0grandchild contact and atti-
tudes towards older adults: Moderator and mediator effects. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin ,31,
393/C0406.
Results and Comments
We recommend that researchers seeking to examine group membership salience as a moderator of intergroup
contact employ the scale used by Harwood et al. (2005) . In both their studies, this scale showed high reliability,
with strong correlations between the salience measures for each grandparent in Study 1. Moreover, the scale cap-
tures the key components of group membership salience during contact, such as awareness and typicality (see
Brown & Hewstone, 2005 ) and thus provides a superior operationalization of salience to single item measures.
As with the other variables considered in this chapter, the multi-item nature of Harwood and colleagues’ salience
items make them an ideal candidate for latent variable modeling and the estimation of associated error /C0another
benefit over single item measures. The fact that the scale is composed of multiple items also holds additional
advantages, since it offers the researcher greater flexibility with regard to statistical/analytical procedures. One
can thus test moderation using latent modeling procedures, estimating both contact (as independent variable)
and salience (as moderator variable) as latent variables, and then also estimate the interaction within a latent vari-
able framework, using a random slope (latent interaction) modeling approach.673 MODERATORS OF THE INTERGROUP CONTACT TO OUTGROUP ATTITUDES RELATIONSHIP
VI. SOCIOCULTURAL INTERACTION AND CONFLICT