Little is known about societal variables impacting service access and utilization patterns of recent immigrant Latino families of children with developmental disabilities and there is no paradigm to explain their past and present cognitions regarding their perceptions of disability rights. I hypothesized that many have historical, social, cultural and educational contexts that influence the extent to which they are empowered to seek meaningful outcomes from educational and social service systems they encounter in the U.S. I addressed one of the underlying ideologies I believed was related to the patterns of service access and utilization seen among monolingual, Spanish Speaking, immigrant Latino parents of children with disabilities. I believed this construct contributed uniquely to patterns in parental access and utilization of educational and social services for Latino parents of children with disabilities.

I was particularly interested in, for which there are currently no quantitative measures to address, is termed Cultural Frame of Reference. I intended to see if John Ogbu's theory regarding Cultural Frame of Reference applied to monolingual Spanish speaking Latino immigrant parents of children with disabilities. I created a new tool for measuring a theoretically derived construct that explains the variability in the extent to which Latino immigrant parents seek and advocate for services received by their children with developmental disabilities. To do so, I developed items based on indicators found in the literature and piloted the items with parents totaling a sample of 101 in order to collect sufficient data to conduct psychometric analyses. I then examined the items using inter-item correlation and exploratory factor analysis. These data were used to conduct an initial test of construct validity.

The new measurement scale identified underlying sociocultural experiences in the everyday encounters of participants. The scale substantiated context, present, and past perceptions of social services and rights' based service system. It also preliminarily suggests Cultural Frame of Reference needs to explore further as a variable involved in the access and utilization patterns among immigrant parents of Latino children with disabilities.