Multicultural Ideology: Origins and Evolution

The Multicultural Ideology Scale (Berry, Kalin & Taylor, 1977) was developed to examine the views of Canadians toward the two basic principles in the Canadian multiculturalism policy (1971): the promotion of cultural diversity as a personal and public good; and the acceptance of social engagements among individual members of all cultural communities within the larger society. Since then, social issues have arisen in many culturally-plural societies that require the addition of some new domains to the two in the original scale. The current project (MCI-r) examines the two original domains (i.e., preference for cultural maintenance and social interaction), and four new domains: the acceptance of equity; belief in the extent of cultural differences, and of essentialistic boundaries; and the consequences of diversity. These conceptual extensions have been examined with empirical studies in a number of societies to be presented in this symposium. This paper presents these conceptual extensions and results from two of these studies. The first study examines the revised scale in Luxembourg and Germany; the second does the same in the United Kingdom. Results from the German-speaking sample supported a 4-factor solution, with the subscales: Cultural Maintenance, Equity/Inclusion, Social Interaction, and Consequences of Diversity. These subscales demonstrated good psychometric properties and included items with high factor loadings. Convergent and discriminant validity tests showed that they assess distinct but interrelated dimensions of multicultural ideology. Results from the UK sample, including convergent and discriminant validity tests, supported the same 4-factor solution as reported for the German-speaking sample.