MEASURING COMMUNITY MOBILIZATION IN THE SEATTLE-MINORITY-YOUTH-HEALTH-PROJECT

This article assesses the validity and reliability of the approach use d to measure community mobilization in the Seattle Minority Youth Heal th Project(MY Health), a neighborhood-based-program to prevent drug us e, violence, teen pregnancy, and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Two constructs were measured: neighborhood cooperation in solving pro blems, and sense of pride and identification with the neighborhood. Th e convergent validity of the measurement approach was assessed by comp aring several independent measures of community mobilization generated from surveys of hey neighborhood leaders, youth and parents. For the neighborhood cooperation construct, correlations were uniformly positi ve across measures from different surveys and statistically significan t about a quarter of the time. The correlations for the neighborhood p ride construct were weaker and generally not statistically significant . Interrater reliability was low for all of the surveys, possibly refl ecting varying ideas about what community mobilization meant among sur vey respondents.