Characteristics Of Stigmas In The Workplace: The Development and Validation of a Scale

Despite widespread practitioner interest in diversity, equity, and inclusion, scholarly understanding is somewhat lacking. Some research endeavors to understand how individuals perceive and respond to marginalized identities by considering five different characteristics of stigmas—concealability, controllability, centrality, disruptiveness, and malleability. However, scholars have yet to fully delve into the mechanisms underlying the process of how individuals perceive and make judgments about different stigmatized attributes in the workplace. One issue hampering the theoretical and empirical advances of this area is that there is currently no reliable measure of the characteristics of stigmas. Therefore, the current paper aims to develop and validate a Stigma Characteristics Scale (SCS) across three studies. In Study 1 we generate items based on the five characteristics of stigma defined in the literature and utilize subject matter experts for content validation. In Study 2, we use a sample of employed individuals (N = 278) and conduct an EFA, where results confirm the presence of five unique dimensions. Finally, in Study 3 we collect responses from 351 employed individuals and further validate our measure with a CFA and convergent and discriminant validity analyses. This results in a final 15-item scale measuring the five characteristics of stigmas.