Measuring Perceptions of Discrimination among Immigrants

• In Event: 242 - Section on International Migration Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 05. Immigration and Discrimination

Abstract

Studying perceptions of discrimination (PD) among immigrants is a sensitive enterprise. Not only are the ways that all individuals perceive, understand, and react to discrimination multiple and complex. In the case of immigrants, added heterogeneity along a number of axes – e.g., length of time spent in a receiving country, language ability, socialization experience regarding the definitions of what constitutes unfair treatment in either the sending country or receiving country, and even interpersonal sensitivity to rejection – complicates social scientific understanding of their perceptions further. In this article, we review the literature on perceived discrimination among immigrant-origin populations as it is conceptualized and operationalized in contemporary survey research. We then describe and present results from a pilot survey that we developed and fielded to a nonrandom convenience sample of 159 Chinese and Mexican immigrants living in the Boston, Chicago, and Seattle (United States) and Toronto and London (Canada) metropolitan areas. As an exploratory pilot study, this survey instrument was purposively designed to include new questions with more refined response categories and that are more sensitive to the immigrant experience. Our results suggest that, at least regarding new immigrant populations, how survey questions about PD are structured and phrased matter greatly; the more scholars can specify clearly the contexts, frequency, and strength or type of PD, the more nuance they may be able to capture. In particular, we find that categorical PD questions and failure to control for interpersonal sensitivity may bias results.

Authors

• Helen B. Marrow, Tufts University

• Victoria Esses, University of Western Ontario

• Cheryl Kaiser, University of Washington

• Daniel J Hopkins, Georgetown University