Abstract:
The aim of this study was to analyze the Explicit Discrimination Scale (EDS), in order to determine its capacity to reflect intersectional experiences with discrimination among groups subjected to class, race, and gender oppression. The study was based on data from a study conducted in a representative sample of students (n = 1,023) at Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil, regularly enrolled during the first semester of 2012. The statistical analysis included estimation of the relative frequencies of each of the 18 items in the EDS, as well as the main reasons, stratified by sex/gender, color/race, and socioeconomic status. Negative binomial regression models allowed assessing whether sex/gender, race/color, and socioeconomic status are predictors of the discrimination score, even after adjusting for covariates that potentially affect the target associations. The results of the analysis of each of the instrument’s 18 items suggest that the EDS allows measurement of discrimination in among multiply marginalized groups, since it draws out the experiences with discrimination in minority subgroups, such as low-income black women. Still, this tendency was not observed in the instrument’s global score, suggesting that it does not allow positioning the respondent along a spectrum of discrimination that includes less and more intense expressions of the phenomenon. Future studies are needed to deal with this observed limitation and which thus lend greater visibility to the experiences of discrimination in groups exposed to multiple marginalization.
Keywords:
Discrimination; Race; Gender; Social Class