A Preliminary Quantitative Scale Construction of Perceived Immigration Threat

Abstract

Attempts to measure anti-immigration attitudes within policy research struggles to encompass the full nuance of modern immigration definitions. To heighten the applicability of immigration-related statistics in policy change, the possibility of alternative anti-immigration measurements is considered. Further the addition of interdisciplinary methodologies, such as social psychology theory, compliments immigration research. The Integrated Threat Theory of Prejudice(ITT) is used as a theoretical framework to inform the construction of a measurement for how survey respondents perceive immigration as a threat. Reliability analysis supported previous research on ITT as a framework, additionally justifying a scale construction based on gaps discovered between the referent of selected survey questions and the reliability of the resulting item cluster. Future research aims to conduct primary research to further validate the creation of a new measurement known as Perceived Immigration Threat, or PIT.