Measuring Everyday Racial/Ethnic Discrimination in Health Surveys: How Best to Ask the Questions, in one or two Stages, across Multiple Racial/Ethnic Groups?
Shariff-Marco, S.; Breen, N.; Landrine, H.; Reeve, B.B.; Krieger, N.; Gee, G.C.; Williams, D.R.; Mays, V.M.; Ponce, N.A.; Alegría, M.; Liu, B.; Willis, G.; Johnson, T.P.
Du Bois Review Social Science Research on Race 8(1): 159-177
2011
ISSN/ISBN: 1742-058X PMID: 29354187 DOI: 10.1017/s1742058x11000129Document Number: 357580
While it is clear that self-reported racial/ethnic discrimination is related to illness, there are challenges in measuring self-reported discrimination or unfair treatment. In the present study, we evaluate the psychometric properties of a self-reported instrument across racial/ ethnic groups in a population-based sample, and we test and interpret findings from applying two different widely-used approaches to asking about discrimination and unfair treatment. Even though we found that the subset of items we tested tap into a single underlying concept, we also found that different groups are more likely to report on different aspects of discrimination. Whether race is mentioned in the survey question affects both frequency and mean scores of reports of racial/ethnic discrimination. Our findings suggest caution to researchers when comparing studies that have used different approaches to measure racial/ethnic discrimination and allow us to suggest practical empirical guidelines for measuring and analyzing racial/ethnic discrimination. No less important, we have developed a self-reported measure of recent racial/ethnic discrimination that functions well in a range of different racial/ethnic groups and makes it possible to compare how racial/ethnic discrimination is associated with health disparities among multiple racial/ethnic groups.