Psychometrics of racism is an emerging field that aims to measure the incidence and impacts of racism on the psychological well-being of people of all races. At present, there are few instruments that attempt to capture the experience of racism in all of its complexity.
Self-reported inventories
The Schedule of Racist Events (SRE) is questionnaire for assessing frequency of racial discrimination in lives of
African American
African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ens ...
s created in 1998 by
Hope Landrine and Elizabeth A. Klonoff. SRE is an 18-item self-report inventory, assesses frequency of specific
racist events in past year and in one's entire life, and measures to what extent this
discrimination was stressful.
Other
psychometric
Psychometrics is a field of study within psychology concerned with the theory and technique of measurement. Psychometrics generally refers to specialized fields within psychology and education devoted to testing, measurement, assessment, and ...
tools for assessing the impacts of racism include:
* The Racism Reaction Scale (RRS)
* Perceived Racism Scale (PRS)
* Index of Race-Related Stress (IRRS)
* Racism and Life Experience Scale-Brief Version (RaLES-B)
* Telephone-Administered Perceived Racism Scale (TPRS)
Physiological metrics
In a summary of recent research
Jules P. Harrell, Sadiki Hall, and James Taliaferro describe how a growing body of research has explored the impact of encounters with racism or discrimination on physiological activity. Several of the studies suggest that
higher blood pressure levels are associated with the tendency not to recall or report occurrences identified as racist and discriminatory. In other words, failing to recognize instances of racism is directly impacted by the blood pressure of the person experiencing the racist event. Investigators have reported that physiological arousal is associated with laboratory analogues of ethnic discrimination and mistreatment.
Physiological Responses to Racism and Discrimination: An Assessment of the Evidence
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See also
* Race and health
Race and health refers to how being identified with a specific race influences health. Race is a complex concept that has changed across chronological eras and depends on both self-identification and social recognition. In the study of race and ...
* Stereotype threat
Stereotype threat is a situational predicament in which people are or feel themselves to be at risk of conforming to stereotypes about their social group. It is theorized to be a contributing factor to long-standing racial and gender gaps in acad ...
* White guilt
White guilt is a belief that white people bear a collective responsibility for the harm which has resulted from historical or current racist treatment of people belonging to other racial groups, as for example in the context of the Atlantic slave ...
References
Psychometrics
Racism
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