To identify social identities salient to this population, this study included a preliminary assessment that was used in developing the survey items used to measure social idenity. Respondents’ social identities were measured using a process that was adapted from Brown et al.’s (2008) Social Type Rating (STR) procedure. The STR procedure allows for crowd types to be defined by the population. It uses an inductive approach to discover social identities that meaningfully distinguish people in a population into groups, and then uses these identities to develop survey measures that are relevant from the perspective of that population. Accordingly, the survey items used in this study were created based on preliminary analysis using data from the priority population to unsure their validity.
Instead of relying on verbal labels to identify different peer crowds, we used image-based measures developed by Rescue Social Change Group called the I-Base. These image-based measures more closely match the lived experience of young people, who often express their peer crowd affiliations visually (Brown et al., 2008). Identity groupings could be easily compared using the standardized set of images rather than verbal labels. This was preferable to using verbal labels since such labels involve more interpretation by participants and researchers, potentially introducing additional measurement error and bias.