Adaptation and validation of scales for measuring interethnic attitudes, contact intentions and prosocial intentions towards outgroup members on the sample of children from Kosovo and Metohija

Contact interventions represent one of the most effective ways of reducing intergroup prejudice, and research shows they are particularly effective when applied in the young age. However, the effectiveness of such interventions is often measured using instruments whose validity has not been sufficiently tested, which complicates understanding of the obtained effects. Therefore, this paper focuses on the adaptation and validation of several instruments for measuring attitudes and behavioural intentions among primary school students from a post-conflict area. The aim of the research is to verify the factor structure of the adapted scales and their convergent, discriminant and predictive validity. The sample consisted of 142 students (50.7% boys), aged 8 to 12, from the Northern Kosovo and Metohija. A total of seven measures of attitudes, contact intentions and prosocial intentions were used in order to provide recommendations for the application of the most adequate measures in future research. The exploratory factor analysis indicates a unidimensional structure of all questionnaire measures. Although all instruments showed convergence - suggesting they measure the space of a general intergroup attitude - the test of discriminant validity indicated that general attitudes cannot be distinguished from contact intentions and prosocial intentions. The analysis of predictive validity favours questionnaire measures of general attitude over the measures of behavioural intentions. The instruments proved suitable for use with lower-grade primary school students and can be useful in future research on intergroup contact in children, while the choice of the instrument may depend on the participants' age and the study design.