Social Maltreatment and Symptomatology: Validating the Social Discrimination and Maltreatment Scale—Short Form in a Diverse Online Sample

There are few psychometrically valid measures of exposure to social maltreatment that simultaneously assess sexism, racism, and anti-LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other nonheteronormative) behavior, despite the commonness of these phenomena. The <i>Social Discrimination and Maltreatment Scale</i> (SDMS) meets this requirement but is, as a result, somewhat lengthy (36 items). This article introduces a short form of the SDMS containing only half the number of items but generally retaining the psychometric qualities of the original measure. The 18-item <i>Social Discrimination and Maltreatment Scale-Short Form</i> (SDMS-SF) consists of six SDMS stem items (e.g., <i>I have been disrespected, People made cruel or demeaning jokes about me</i>) each of which is rated according to how often it had happened <i>"because of my sex," "because of my race,"</i> and <i>"because of my sexual orientation or gender identity."</i> In the SDMS online sample (<i>N</i> = 528), SDMS-SF <i>Sexism, Racism</i>, and <i>Cisheterosexism</i> subscales were validated by confirmatory factor analysis and were internally consistent (α = .91-.95) and highly correlated with the original SDMS subscales (<i>r</i> = .94 in all cases). All SDMS-SF subscales correlated with self-reported anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress (mean <i>r</i> = .29), corresponding to a medium effect size. In all but one instance, related SDMS and SDMS-SF subscales did not differ significantly in the strength of their association with symptomatology. Together, these results suggest that the SDMS-SF is a reliable and valid measure of social discrimination, generally equivalent to the SDMS despite containing only half as many items.