Abstract
Early scales developed to measure experiences of everyday racial discrimination employ an interpersonal schema of the racial discrimination construct (e.g, McNeilly 1996; Williams 1997; Krieger et al. 2005). For example, the Perceived Racism Scale conceives of racial discrimination as “a belief or attitude that some races are superior to others and discrimination based on such a belief” (McNeilly 1996, 155). However, racial discrimination is now recognized to be a more expansive construct that includes structural oppression. Measures of discriminatory experiences of structural oppression lag behind. In this talk, I argue that the concept of path dependence is useful for understanding how measurements of everyday racial discrimination in psychology and sociology have (1) developed to primarily measure features of interpersonal discrimination and (2) frequently fail to measure cases of structural discrimination. Path dependent systems are those in which a particular change in a system’s history reinforces its development along particular “paths” and hinders other “paths”. The concept of path dependence gained traction in economics, social science, and science and technology studies (e.g., David 2001) to analyze why some standards set by a previous technology are perpetuated in future designs, even when alternatives may be as good or better. The classic but contested example is the QWERTY organization of keyboards (David 1985; Leibowitz and Margolis 1990). According to David (1985), the QWERTY layout was chosen to solve a technical issue with previous typewriter designs, namely, putting commonly used letters further apart to avoid errors when congruent type bars are pressed in sequence by . While we no longer face this technical problem, QWERTY layouts persist even when superior alternatives exist, such as the Dvorak layout. Path dependence can help explain why interpersonal scales have dominated the measurement of racial discrimination in psychology and sociology. The features of measurement validation reinforce the early focus on an interpersonal schema of the racial discrimination construct because earlier published scales become standards by which to evaluate future scales. When multiple measurement scales are intended to measure the same construct, we assess their convergent validity: the extent to which both measures do in fact measure the same construct. In psychology, convergent validity is often measured by assessing correlation coefficients of the scores on those measures. There is no explicit rule to determine what strength of correlation is required, so judgments are made implicitly and case-by-case. Further, an imperfect correlation is to be expected: noise in the data is expected and different scales ought to have some relevant differences. Small differences in scales can sometimes lead to importantly distinct results (e.g., one or two questions for race and ethnicity in the U.S. Census would impact the amount of self-identifying Hispanic people; Valles 2021). Thus, when implicit judgments require high convergent validity between existing scales and new scales, path dependence can emerge. Applying this analysis to the case of everyday racial discrimination measures, this path dependence has led to a focus on interpersonal discrimination over structural discrimination.
