Measuring Racial Discrimination (2004) / Chapter Skim
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6 Experimental Methods for Assessing Discrimination
6 Experimental Methods for Assessing Discrimination
Pages 90-117
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From page 90... ...
Accurately determining what constitutes the effect of discrimination, personal choice, and other related and unrelated factors requires the ability to draw clear causal inferences. In this chapter, we review two experimental approaches that have been used by researchers to reach causal conclusions about racial discrimination: laboratory experiments and field experiments (particularly audit studies)
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From page 91... ...
Researchers who use randomized controlled experiments to measure discrimination, therefore, can manipulate race by either varying the "apparent" race of a target person as the experimental treatment or can manipulate "apparent" discrimination by randomly assigning study participants to being treated with different degrees of discrimination. In the first case, the experimenter varies the treatment, namely, the apparent race, by such means as by providing race-related cues on job applications (e.g., name or school attended)
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From page 92... ...
If the logistic causal model is correct, the inference about the key causal coefficient from the retrospective study is the same as if one had done a prospective sampling on the explanatory variable.1 Those results, however, do not generalize to relationships among continuous variables. LABORATORY EXPERIMENTS Design Laboratory experiments, like all experiments, include the standard features of (1)
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From page 93... ...
As noted above, while strictly speaking one cannot manipulate the actual race of a single person, experimenters do typically either manipulate the apparent race of a target person or randomly assign subjects or study participants to the experimental condition while attempting to hold constant all other attributes of possible relevance. One common method of varying race is for experimenters to train several experimental confederates -- both black and white -- to interact with study participants according to a prepared script, to dress in comparable style, and to represent comparable levels of baseline physical attractiveness (see, e.g., Cook and Pelfrey, 1985; Dovidio et al., 2002; Henderson-King and Nisbett, 1996; Stephan and Stephan, 1989)
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From page 94... ...
Measuring Racial Discrimination Experimenters measure varying degrees of discrimination. Laboratory measures of discrimination begin with verbal hostility (e.g., in studies of interracial aggression)
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From page 95... ...
. Key Examples Since the 1980s, laboratory experiments on discrimination have concentrated more on measuring subtle forms of bias and less on examining overt behaviors, such as helping others.
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From page 96... ...
The interviewers' nonverbal behavior indicated less immediacy (i.e., greater discomfort and less warmth) toward black than white applicants on a number of measures scored by judges behind one-way mirrors: greater physical seating distance, shorter interviews, and more speech errors.
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From page 97... ...
For example, researchers randomly assigned participants to see, at subliminal speeds, words related to rudeness or neutral topics and showed that those participants exposed to rude words responded more rudely to an experimenter. In a parallel experiment, subliminal exposure to photographs of unfamiliar black male faces, as compared with white ones, was followed by more rude, hostile behavior when the white experimenter subsequently made an annoying request.
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From page 98... ...
Participants shown the second video after the first no longer demurred regarding the child's academic performance. Instead, they rated her performance as well below grade level if they had viewed the 6-minute video depicting low socioeconomic status and at grade level if they had seen the video depicting high socioeconomic sta tus.
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From page 99... ...
Such experiments can manipulate racial and moderator variables; test various hypothesized mechanisms of discrimination, such as attitudes; and assess various hypothesized manifestations of discrimination, including verbal, nonverbal, and affiliative responses. They can also simulate pieces of real-world situations of interest, such as job applications and others.
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From page 100... ...
At the beginning of the term, white college students completed a 20-item standardized measure of prejudice, the Attitudes Toward Blacks Scale. Later in the semester, 40 students (15 male and 25 female)
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From page 101... ...
, which correlated significantly with a series of implicit, subtle forms of dis criminatory behavior: nonverbal behavior rated by observers from silent videotapes, confederate perceptions of participants' friendliness, and overall friendliness rated by other observers, which also correlated sig nificantly with each other. In other words, whites' implicit attitudes pre dicted their bias and others' perceptions of bias in nonverbal friendliness.
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From page 102... ...
Many of the potential biases and artifacts of laboratory experiments also occur at least as often in other kinds of experiments (e.g., field experiments, which we turn to next) , as well as with nonexperimental methods (natural experiments and observational studies, such as surveys)
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From page 103... ...
, we do not review other types of field experiments in the domain of racial discrimination.
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From page 104... ...
In propensity score matching, an index of similarity is created by fitting a logistic regression with the outcome variable being race and the explanatory variables being the relevant characteristics on which one wishes to match. Subjects of one race are then paired or matched with subjects of the other race having similar fitted logit values -- the pro 2In the following discussion on audit studies, we draw heavily on a commissioned paper by Ross and Yinger (2002)
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From page 105... ...
Non-Hispanic whites are consistently favored over African Americans and Hispanics in metropolitan rental and 4Ross and Yinger (2002) posit that because only a single audit is typically conducted for a given firm, audit studies can pose challenges for enforcement officials.
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From page 106... ...
Results of the earliest audits were impaired by small sample sizes, nonrandom assignment methods, and failure to use standardized instruments and procedures. However, practices and methods gradually improved, and the cumula tive body of work consistently showed that African Americans continued to suffer from various forms of housing discrimination despite the legal prohibition of such discrimination (see Galster, 1990a, 1990b, for re views of local studies)
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From page 107... ...
, between 60 and 90 percent of the housing units made available to whites were not brought to the attention of blacks. Over the course of the 1990s, various researchers carried out housing audits in different metropolitan areas using various methods (Galster, 1998; Massey and Lundy, 2001; Ondrich et al., 2000)
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From page 108... ...
This study uses a large sample and avoids many of the problems of audit studies (e.g., auditor heterogeneity) by randomly assigning race to different résumés.
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From page 109... ...
Newspaper advertisements can be limiting because the sampling frame is restricted to members of disadvantaged racial groups who respond to typical advertisements and are qualified for the advertised housing unit or job. This limited sample may lead to a very specific interpretation of discrimination.
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From page 110... ...
They also found that higher-quality résumés yielded significant returns for white applicants (14 percent callback rate for white applicant/high-quality résumés versus 10 percent for white applicant/low quality résumés) but not for black applicants (7.7 percent callback rate for black applicant/high-quality résumés versus 7.0 percent for black ap plicant/low-quality résumés)
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From page 111... ...
This design has several advantages over audit studies. One advan tage is the ability to use a large number of résumés, as opposed to a smaller number of auditors, and thus the ability to send those résumés out to a large number of employers.
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From page 112... ...
note that it would be valuable to know the true experiences of members of disadvantaged racial groups on average, but such information could not reveal the extent to which these individuals change their behavior to avoid experiencing discrimination. As a result, discrimination encountered by averaging over members of a disadvantaged racial group is not a complete measure of the impact of racial discrimination (Holzer and Ludwig, 2003)
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From page 113... ...
. Murphy formally delineates the circumstances under which an estimate of discrimination will be erroneous if the researcher fails to account for individual auditor characteristics that do not vary in distribution by race and therefore were not used in the matching process.
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From page 114... ...
Addressing the Limitations of Audit Studies Ross and Yinger (2002) offer several options for addressing the limitations of audit studies.
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From page 115... ...
HUD's national audit study of housing discrimination, conducted in 2000, explicitly collected information on many actual characteristics of testers, such as their income (as opposed to the income assigned to them for the study) , their education, and their experience in conducting tests.6 SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS True experiments involve manipulation of the variable hypothesized to be causal, random assignment of participants to the experimental condition, and control of confounding variables.
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From page 116... ...
Over the past two decades, laboratory experiments have focused more on measuring subtle forms of bias and nonverbal forms of discriminatory behavior and less on examining overt behaviors, such as assisting others. If laboratory studies were to be more focused on real-world-type behaviors, they could help analysts who use statistical models for developing causal inferences from observational data (see Chapter 7)
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From page 117... ...
Recommendation 6.2. Nationwide field audit studies of racially based housing discrimination, such as those implemented by the U.S.
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