A community-partnered process for construct & measure development: The 3Rs: Reading, Racial equity, & Relationships

This paper describes a 3-year community-partnered research initiative focused on advancing early reading, racial equity, and relationships-collectively known as the 3Rs Initiative. The project brought together researchers and community members committed to ensuring that all adults in the county embody a shared "3Rs mindset" to better support literacy development for children in kindergarten through third grade. In Study 1, researchers and community members (The 3Rs team) used thematic analysis of interviews, meeting notes, and group activity and discussion artifacts with community stakeholders to construct and validate a definition of a 3Rs mindset. In Study 2, the 3Rs team created a 36-item scale that could assess an adult's 3Rs mindset. The scale demonstrated excellent content validity, response process, and associative validity. Findings from both studies suggest that community-partnered measure development can be achieved through collaboration, honoring of multiple perspectives, and elevating community partners as "experiential experts" (El Mallah, 2024, p. 984). Measures resulting from such processes have the benefit of community-defined cultural specificity and strong content validity and can be leveraged towards social change.