CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 155Racial and Ethnic Identity ResearchHealth disparities and outcomesPsychometric Methodologies and Testing

MEASURING EVERYDAY RACIAL/ETHNIC DISCRIMINATION IN HEALTH SURVEYS: How Best to Ask the Questions, in One or Two Stages, Across Multiple Racial/Ethnic Groups?

Open access
Shariff-Marco, Salma, Breen, Nancy, Landrine, Hope, Reeve, Bryce B., Krieger, Nancy, Gee, Gilbert C., Williams, David R., Mays, Vickie M. +5 more·2011·Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race
DOI 10.1017/s1742058x11000129PMC PMC5771490
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

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.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1017/s1742058x11000129

Cites

69 of 69 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • The MDM was developed using a sample representative of the US population (approximately 40% POC) and has shown good internal consistency (α=.81-.88) in a previous study.

    “The MDM was developed using a sample representative of the US population (approximately 40% POC) and has shown good internal consistency (α=.81-.88) in a previous study [59].”

    From App-Based Mindfulness Meditation for People of Color Who Experience Race-Related Stress: Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Trial (2022) · cites this paper as [59]

    The Results (Psychometric Findings; page unavailable) report Cronbach’s alpha of 0.88 and 0.81 for the two versions, supporting the internal-consistency claim. The Methods (Overview; page unavailable) identify the sample as respondents to the California Health Interview Survey, not a representative US sample; its reported racial/ethnic counts also do not support approximately 40% people of color. (LLM, conf=0.91)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

  • Such measures are often deployed in limited ways comparing care or outcomes for specific groups defined by a single demographic characteristic.

    “such measures are often deployed in limited ways comparing care or outcomes of care for specific groups of people defined by a single demographic characteristic (e.g., a particular ethnocultural or racialized group) [15, 16].”

    From Using a health equity lens to measure patient experiences of care in diverse health care settings (2024) · cites this paper as [15]

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 3

  1. Feagin Joe R 2006 Systematic Racism New York CRC Press
  2. Nunnally Jum C Bernstein Ira H 1994 Psychometric Theory 3 New York McGraw Hill Co
  3. Piesse Andrea Judkins David R Fan Zizhong 2005 Item Imputation Made Easy Proceedings of the Survey Research Methods Section of the American Statistical Association 2540 2546

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
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.
Affiliations
  • National Cancer Institute (UA)
  • East Carolina University (US)
  • Harvard University (US)
  • University of California, Los Angeles (US)
  • University of Illinois Chicago (US)
ORCID
Venue
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Published
2011
Volume
8
Issue
1
Pages
159-177
ISSN
  • 1742-058X (ISSN-L)
  • 1742-0598
DOI
10.1017/s1742058x11000129
PMC
PMC5771490
OpenAlex
W2185610270
Cited by
155
References
69
Citations by year
2026: 8 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 13 · 2023: 13 · 2022: 19 · 2021: 24 · 2020: 8 · 2019: 12 · 2018: 9 · 2017: 6 · 2016: 6 · 2015: 12 · 2014: 7 · 2013: 3 · 2012: 7
FWCI
19.29
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
www.cambridge.org/core/terms (unspecified, 104 d)
Locations
  • Du Bois Review Social Science Research on Race (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
Funders
National Institutes of Health (Z99 MD999999)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Racial and Ethnic Identity Research
  • Social Sciences › Health › Health disparities and outcomes
  • Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Management Science and Operations Research › Psychometric Methodologies and Testing
Keywords
racial and ethnic discrimination, self-reported discrimination, unfair treatment, psychometric properties, discrimination measurement, health disparities, survey question wording, cross-group comparison, health survey

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review