Measuring Cultural Logics of Racism & Sexism: Refining our Understanding ofHow Discrimination Impacts Health & Well-Being

Abstract

There has been much demographic innovation in measuring the effects of racism and sexism on health, including the development of interpersonal and structural measures of discrimination. But how have these academic conceptualizations of racism and sexism reached the general population? To better discern how discrimination impacts health, it is important to examine how individuals understand these forms of discrimination. The proposed study uses the cultural concept of “logics” to capture how people define concepts like racism and sexism. This proposal seeks funding for the quantitative part of a mixed-methods project. In the qualitative part of this project (conducted in 2021), we collected interview data from a diverse sample of 38 individuals in the Columbus area, finding evidence for four distinct logics of racism and sexism. We found that these logics rest on different prioritizations of intentionality, consequence, and historical context around race and gender in the US. These findings led to four inductive hypotheses about demographic differences in how social groups define racism and sexism. In the second part of the project, for which we are seeking IPR support, we plan to test these hypotheses in a survey-experimental framework. To maximize external validity, the survey-experiment will use real-world scenarios that emerged in the interview data and will ask participants to decide whether these scenarios are racist and/or sexist. We therefore request funding to develop quantitative measures of these logics and collect data from a nationally representative sample which will allow us to draw inferences about whether and how different social groups define these concepts. We will also preliminarily examine whether different logics of racism and sexism are linked to self-rated health. In addition to funding for data collection, we are also seeking support for a GRA for assistance in collecting and analyzing these data. Findings from the survey-experiment will then lay the groundwork for several external grant proposals to investigate the degree to which these different logics of racism and sexism are protective of –or detrimental for –various health outcomes. By taking a cultural and cognitive perspective on how people understand and think about racism and sexism, this project strives to help demographers and population health researchers more precisely pinpoint when, how, and why discrimination gets under the skin.