You‘ve Got M@il – Field Experiments of Ethnic Discrimination in Everyday Life

• In Event: 148 - Regular Session. Racial and Ethnic Inequality

Abstract

In recent years, scientific studies have tried to elicit whether ethnic discrimination is a major phenomenon in social interactions. Usually, papers dealing with this topic focus on core aspects of life, namely disadvantages in education, in the labor market, and in housing decisions. But it is everyday life where stigmas and hence discrimination evolve as Erving Goffman pointed out 50 years ago.
Therefore, we conduct a field experiment in two counties of Germany shifting the focus on areas of everyday life overlooked so far (holiday apartments, IT services, day-care facilities, restaurants, and shooting clubs). We send experimental requests via email to different addressees signed with either German or Turkish names and evaluate the responses we get. Furthermore, the postal addresses of our subjects are available, thus we can control for context variables (geodata) in our analysis.
With the collected data we test the contact and the conflict hypothesis, statistical and taste based discrimination on a first (answer analysis) and a second stage (content analysis) of discrimination. We find that discrimination of Turkish senders in both stages is striking: they receive less often a positive answer, have to wait longer for an answer, and get less helpful answers (length of the email, number of tips) in almost all fields of everyday life. Furthermore, we find hints for the validity of the contact hypothesis on the first stage of discrimination and for the conflict hypothesis on the second stage of discrimination, while statistical discrimination seems to be effective on both stages.

Authors

• Christiane Bozoyan, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich

• Sonja Pointner, LMU München