Investigating aspects of an emerging digital ethnicity: Development of the Digital Ethnicity Scale (DES)

The Digital Ethnicity Scale (DES), utilizing Longstreet (1978) model of the aspects of ethnicity, was developed to describe the impact human interaction with digital communication technologies is having on cultural development. Longstreet’s definition of ethnicity focuses on cultural development during the earliest stages of human development, prior to the onset of children’s abstract thinking. The ultimate goal for the development of the Digital Ethnicity Scale is to describe those aspects of digital ethnicity and collect these descriptions along with demographic data to achieve profiles of various digital ethnicities. These digital ethnic profiles may provide insight into the social and educational needs of rapidly changing societal groupings with hopes of providing guidance for future practice. A 5-phase development process, including the development and validation of both Likert-type items and semantic differentials, was conducted with more than 2000 respondents. Both theoretical and practical results of this inquiry are presented.