‘Strangers in Their Own Land’: Development and Validation of a Balanced, Unidimensional Scale to Measure the Sense of Threat to Local Traditions

Individuals and communities all over the world are experiencing rapid societal changes due to economic, social, cultural, and political cross-national interconnections. Social scientists agree on the importance of understanding the psychological, social, and cultural implications of this globalization process (Diaz & Zirkel, 2012; Scholte, 2005). These analyses cannot ignore the reaction of people who feel threatened in their consolidated social practices by the growing exposure to the symbolic cues of social changes, leading them to feel like ‘strangers in their own land’ (Hochschild, 2016). However, a solid and convincing scale measuring people’s perception of threat to local traditions does not exist. This hinders a solid testing of this psychological consequence of globalization. To fill this gap, we developed and validated the Sense of Threat to Local Traditions (SETLOT) Scale with a wide quota sample of the Italian adult population.