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26 - Complexities in the Measurement of Explicit Racial Attitudes

from Section VI - Explicit Prejudice; Alive and Well?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2024

By
Leonie Huddy ,
Stanley Feldman  and
Payel Sen
Edited by
Jon A. Krosnick ,
Tobias H. Stark  and
Amanda L. Scott
Jon A. Krosnick
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
Tobias H. Stark
Affiliation:
Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Amanda L. Scott
Affiliation:
The Strategy Team, Columbus, Ohio
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Summary

The assessment of racial attitudes remains central to social science research, yet researchers differ widely in how they are measured. There is an ongoing debate over whether it is possible to assess racial attitudes, directly leading some researchers to develop measures of new racism such as modern racism and others to abandon the explicit assessment of racial negativity altogether in favor of implicit measures. Nonetheless, explicit measures of racial negativity remain pervasive in social and political psychological research. But unlike implicit attitudes, there is no consensus on the best way in which to measure them. In this chapter, we document current diversity in the measurement of explicit racial attitudes and demonstrate that component scale items can be divided empirically into three distinct concepts. Not all three concepts clearly reflect racial animosity, however. We map these three concepts onto racial resentment, a widely used measure of new racism, to demonstrate its questionable status as a measure of racial negativity. We conclude by suggesting the adoption of overt racism measures in psychological race-related research and urge for greater uniformity in the assessment of explicit racial attitudes.

Keywords

implicit and explicit measuresracial attituderacial resentmentovert racism
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Implicit Bias and Racism , pp. 675 - 691
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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