Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (L.A.FANS): Scales

QUESTION: I’m using the public data and have a couple of questions on some of the scales that are used:
  1. In the primary caregiver questionnaire items B1 a though g–is this a scale that has been used in other studies or was it created specifically for LA FANS? What specific construct are these questions measuring? Is there any information on psychometric properties for this scale?
  2. And then I had the same questions for the child questionnaire items A2 through A5

RESPONSE:

As noted in the PCG individual file codebook, questions GB1A to GB1G are related to the Pearlin Self-Efficacy Scale. In the main LAFANS codebook under the section describing the questionnaire modules, it gives the citation for the Pearlin Scale (“The Stress Process” in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 22:337-356 by Pearlin etal.)

As for the Child questionnaire items A2-A5, these are questions about the neighborhood, based, in part, on previous surveys. If you are interested in the origin of individual variables, see Appendix A: “Origin of the L.A.FANS Module Questions” of The Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey: Household Questionnaires Working Paper

QUESTION: Regarding questions ph71a-ph71dd on the parent questionnaire, I have looked at past work that uses the child behavior checklist to create validated clinical constructs for various behaviors (e.g. internalizing/externalizing score, anxious depressed score etc). There are also published clinical cutoffs for these conditions based on established t scores. But all of these are created from the entire child behavior checklist. LAFANS only asked a select number of questions from the child behavior checklist. I was wondering if an abbreviated instrument exists that the LAFANS team used to choose which particular questions it asked? Any advice on how to go about creating these constructs without having all of the questions?

RESPONSE:

What we used is the Behavior Problems Index (BPI) created by Zill and Peterson. They created a subset of questions in the CBCL for use in large scale surveys. If you look on page 86 of the codebook, you’ll find a full description plus reference for the BPI.

You can also look at appendix B of this online report which used the BPI from L.A.FANS:

Los Angeles County Young Children’s Literacy Experiences, Emotional Well-Being and Skills Acquisition: Results from the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey — 2003
Sandraluz Lara-Cinisomo, Anne R. Pebley

QUESTION: Could you provide some guidance as to whether the items in the neighborhood observations form specific scales? If so, what evidence is there of their reliability and do they relate to adult and children outcomes?

RESPONSE:

As described in the codebook, most of these items are drawn from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN). In addition to the codebook, you should also see the link on the LAFANS website that describes where each item in the survey comes from. Specifically, we used neighborhood items from R. J. Sampson et al. (1999) “Beyond Social Capital…” in the American Journal of Sociology. See their work for psychometrics, etc.

Back to top