Associations between Race, Discrimination, Community Violence, Traumatic Life Events, and Psychosis-Like Experiences in a Sample of College Students

Self-report tools of psychosis-like experiences contribute to the understanding of psychosis and may aid in identification and prevention efforts across the severity spectrum. Current tools are likely limited by biases, leading to potential systematic health disparities. Principal component analyses in diverse samples of community participants reporting psychosis-like experiences may aid in the detection of measurement biases. The current study evaluated the fit of a two-component model for the Prime Screen, a self-report psychosis-like experiences measure, in a sample of Black (n = 82) and White (n = 162) community participants, and subsequently evaluated the relation of these components with measures of mental well-being, traumatic life experiences, community violence, and experiences of discrimination. Analyses indicated limited support for a two-component model of the Prime Screen, with four of the items showing high cross-loading across both components (“poor fit” items). Although many Prime Screen items correlated with mental well-being as expected, correlations between item scores and mental well-being were non-significant for poor fit items. Community violence emerged as a significant predictor of some individual item scores for both good and poor fit items, while discrimination predicted only some poor fit item scores. Results highlight the potential limitations of current self-report tools of psychosis-like experiences, as well as possible considerations for improvement for use in diverse populations.