Measuring discrimination

Debates about the contemporary relevance of discrimination have been clouded by a lack of rigorous measurement techniques. How can we disentangle the effects of race from the many other sources of social inequality? What are the obstacles to developing reliable measures of racial discrimination? This article addresses the state-of-the-art approaches to measuring discrimination, including studies of perceptions, attitude surveys, statistical analyses, laboratory and field experiments, and provides a brief overview of the varying approaches, examining their unique strengths and limitations. While no research method is without flaws, careful consideration of the range of methods available helps to match one's research question with the appropriate empirical strategy.

Racial discrimination; Methods of measurement; Audits