Reliability Analysis of the BASC-3 SRP with American Indian/Alaska Native Adolescents

With a vastly growing diverse population, the current focus on diversity-informed assessment has led to research on whether established instruments are reliable to utilize with specific populations. The American Indian/Alaska Native population (AI/AN) is often a group that is underrepresented in various assessments. The BASC-3 is an important assessment in psychoeducational evaluations thus, the goal of the study is to determine whether the BASC-3 is a culturally reliable assessment to use with AI/AN in educational setting. Utilizing the computer program Cocron we compared Cronbach alpha levels across three groups (Native Americans, White, manualized clinical sample) and conducted t-test to compare raw score mean differences between AI/AN and the White comparative group, as well as between AI/AN and the manualized normative sample. Significant differences in reliability occurred in single scales between the White comparative sample and the manualized normative sample, and between the AI/AN group and the comparative group. Most significantly there were raw score mean differences across multiple scales between the AI/AN group and the normative sample. Overall, results suggested the BASC-3 may not be able to accurately assess the AI/AN population. Future research would benefit from a larger sample size of AI/AN participants in order to determine appropriate norms for this population.