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Measuring Racial Discrimination (2004) / Chapter Skim
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Executive Summary
Pages 1-14

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From page 1...
... Specifically, this panel was asked to carry out the following tasks: 1. Give the policy and scholarly communities new tools for assessing the extent to which discrimination continues to undermine the achievement of equal opportunity by suggesting additional means for measuring discrimination that can be applied not only to the racial question but in other important social arenas as well.
From page 2...
... The ambiguity involved in defining race has implications for how data on race are collected. The official federal government standards for data on race and ethnicity currently identify five major racial groups (black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, and white)
From page 3...
... , and question word ing and ordering. Agencies should also collect and analyze longitudi nal data to measure how reported perceptions of racial identification change over time for different groups (e.g., Hispanics and those of mixed race)
From page 4...
... An example of potentially unlawful disparate treatment discrimination would be when an individual is not hired for a job because of his or her race. An example of potentially unlawful disparate impact discrimination would be when an employer uses a test in selecting job applicants that is not a good predictor of performance on the job and results in proportionately fewer job offers being extended to members of disadvantaged racial groups compared with whites.2 Because our intention in this report is to provide guidance to social science researchers interested in measuring discrimination, both components of our definition include a range of behaviors and processes that are not explicitly unlawful or easily measured.
From page 5...
... The panel evaluated four major methods used across different social and behavioral science disciplines to measure racial discrimination: laboratory experiments, field experiments, analysis of observational data and natural experiments, and analysis of survey and administrative record reports. Each method has strengths and weaknesses, particularly for drawing a causal inference that an adverse outcome is the result of race-based discriminatory behavior.
From page 6...
... Yet regardless of how well designed and executed they are, laboratory experiments cannot by themselves directly address how much race-based discrimination against disadvantaged groups contributes to adverse outcomes for those groups in society at large. The major contributions of laboratory experiments are to identify those situations in which discriminatory attitudes and behaviors are more or less likely to occur, as well as the characteristics of people who are more or less likely to exhibit discriminatory attitudes and behaviors, and to provide models of people's mental processes that may lead to racial discrimination.
From page 7...
... Recommendation: Because properly designed and executed field audit studies can provide an important and useful means of measuring dis crimination in various domains, public and private funding agencies should explore appropriately designed experiments for this purpose. (Recommendation 6.3)
From page 8...
... Despite limitations, natural experiments provide useful data for measuring the extent of discrimination prior to a policy change and for groups not affected by the change. Conclusion: The statistical decomposition of racial gaps in social out comes using multivariate regression and related techniques is a valuable tool for understanding the sources of racial differences.
From page 9...
... As expressions of prejudice and discriminatory behavior change over time and become more subtle, new or revised survey questions on racial attitudes and perceived experiences of discrimination may be necessary. Longitudinal and repeated cross-sectional data, including continuous and new measures, are important to illuminate trends and changes in patterns of racially discriminatory attitudes and behaviors among and toward various groups.
From page 10...
... Even when such profiling is not explicitly racial, to the extent that it relies on characteristics that are distributed differently for different racial groups, the result may be a racially disparate impact. Inferring the presence of discriminatory racial profiling from data on disparate outcomes is difficult for the same reasons that it is difficult to infer causation from any statistical model with observational data.
From page 11...
... Because of renewed interest in the United States in the use of profiling to identify and apprehend potential terrorists before they commit violent acts, we also examine briefly the challenges of identifying screening factors that could potentially select would-be terrorists with a significantly higher probability than purely random selection, as well as issues that must factor into the public debate if race or ethnicity (or factors that correlate highly with race or ethnicity) are considered as potential screening factors.
From page 12...
... To make further progress, we believe it will be necessary for funding and program agencies to support research that cuts across disciplinary boundaries, makes use of multiple methods and types of data, and studies racial discrimination as a dynamic process. To be cost-effective, such research should be focused and designed to maximize the analytical value of existing bodies of knowledge and ongoing surveys and administrative records data collections.
From page 13...
... This may require studies of key decisionmaking processes, combined with theoretical models of the ways in which discrimination might occur. For this purpose, the existing literature of laboratory experiments about the kinds of situations in which discriminatory attitudes are most likely to lead to race-based discriminatory treatment should be reviewed and additional experiments commissioned, if the laboratory results are not sufficiently revealing about the decision processes of interest (e.g., employer decisions about job training and promotion, to take a labor market example)


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