Assessing Intersectional Interviewer and Mode Effects in Reports of Discrimination
Discrimination is one of the most important concepts for understanding, analysing, and addressing social inequality. Large-scale surveys that ask about discrimination, such as Understanding Society, are among the best tools we have for assessing the extent of discrimination and its myriad effects on individuals, communities, and societies. Survey mode can shape how respondents answer questions about discrimination. In face-to-face interviews, interviewer characteristics and degree of respondent/ interviewer concordance with salient social categories can also shape respondents’ answers. This research couples an intersectional, social psychological theoretical framework with multivariate statistical analyses of Understandings Society data to investigate how and to what extent mode of data collection and interviewer characteristics shape reports of specific and general forms of discrimination among diverse social groups. Analyses of data Wave 1 will test how multiple dimensions of respondent/ interviewer concordance shape the likelihood of respondents’ reporting everyday discrimination and attributing it to particular characteristics. Analyses of Wave 11 will focus on how survey mode shapes respondents’ likelihood of identifying themselves as members of groups that experience discrimination, and what social statuses they identify as being the cause. Each analysis will be the basis for a professional presentation and a peer-reviewed academic journal article. Findings will help researchers to interpret existing survey research and to design surveys that better reflect diverse groups’ perceptions of discrimination. These contributions will help communities and policymakers to understand the pervasiveness of discrimination and to assess how it changes over time and in response to specific policies and events.
