Measuring left-behind children’s discrimination perception in China: the development of discrimination perceptions of left-behind children Scale

Abstract

With the advancement of urbanization in China, there are millions left-behind children whose parents left home to support families, experiencing lot of discrimination. The study aims to develop a scale measuring left-behind children’s discrimination perceptions (discrimination perceptions of left-behind children, DPLC) in China and investigate the discrimination perceptions of left-behind children using the DPLC scale. The data for 105 left-behind children were used to measure the reliability and analyze the items of the DPLC scale in the pre-test. The data for 402 left-behind children were used to verify the construct validity and internal consistency of the DPLC scale and investigate children’ discrimination perceptions of left-behind in China. This study reports the development process of the DPLC scale and presents a valid scale for measuring discrimination perceptions of left-behind in the future.