A Dream or a Nightmare? Creating and Validating the Belief in the American Dream Scale

The American Dream is a dominant cultural narrative that reinforces inequality and obscures systemic oppression. Using a critical race lens, we develop and validate a measure for the Belief in the American Dream. Across two studies, we conduct exploratory (N = 296 U.S. immigrant participants) and confirmatory (N = 398 nationally representative U.S. participants) factor analyses. The 23 items loaded onto three subscales: U.S. supremacy, individual freedoms, and bootstrap mentality. The scale demonstrates convergent validity with measures such as Protestant Work Ethic, Social Dominance Orientation, meritocracy, Right Wing Authoritarianism, and political conservatism, and divergent validity with lay beliefs in structural racism and critical consciousness. The scale predicted greater support for anti-immigrant policies above and beyond meritocracy and right-wing authoritarianism. This new validated measure can advance our understanding of factors that sustain and combat inequality.