Measuring Self-Perceived Racial and Ethnic Discrimination in Social Surveys

The aim of this article is to encourage a research agenda that attends to methodological considerations regarding measuring self-perceived racial and ethnic discrimination in social surveys. Toward this end, the author compared validity of alternative measures of discrimination. The first measure asks whether something unfair or bad has happened because of race and ethnicity, whereas the second measure asks about generic unfair events independent of attribution to race or ethnicity. In a probability sample of 586 Black respondents living in the Detroit metropolitan area interviewed in 1995, it was found that the prevalence of self-perceived racial and ethnic discrimination depended on question framing. Moreover, different respondents were likely to respond affirmatively to explicit versus generic measures of discrimination; importantly, the mental health consequences of self-perceived racial and ethnic discrimination varied by question framing. The results confirmed that the prevalence, correlates, and psychological impact of self-perceived discrimination should be evaluated on the basis of measurement sensitivity.