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🪵 The Threshold

Correspondence-testing field experiments best demonstrate discrimination but mainly cover ethnic rather than religious bias

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tagsja-picks, define, xref, factual_claims, primary_study, singleton, category/factual-claims
aliases@hussain_framing_2017, loc. 283

3 min read

Correspondence-testing field experiments best demonstrate discrimination but mainly cover ethnic rather than religious bias

Evidence

The most rigorous way in which to establish the occurrence of discrimination is to conduct a field experiment. In field experiments on discrimination, what the investigators do is to send matched applications from fictitious applicants for actual, real-life job vacancies. The CVs of the two fictitious applications indicate that the applicants have identical work-relevant skills and experience. A large number of these paired applications are sent out to a selection of randomly chosen vacancies and the researchers then compare the respective positive callback rates (for example, invitations to an interview) for applicants with ‘British names’ and those with ‘minority names’. A higher callback rate for fictitious applicants with ‘British names’ than for matched applicants with ‘minority names’ is pretty conclusive evidence of discrimination in recruitment. This is by far the best evidence available for discrimination on grounds of ethnic origins or faith, although it covers only the very first stage of the application process. … We do have quite a good series of field experiments testing for racial discrimination in Britain, going back to 1969. However, these were all based on ethnic background, rather than on religious affiliation. The research demonstrates that both black and Asian minorities experience quite substantial discrimination, whereas white minorities experience very little. Moreover, the level of discrimination has barely changed over time, despite legislation such as the 1976 Race Relations Act and the activities of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. Unfortunately none of these studies has explicitly compared Muslims with members of other faiths or those with no faith. To be sure, in some cases the studies have distinguished predominantly Muslim origins such as Pakistani or Bangladeshi. However, it is not clear that British employers can readily distinguish South Asian Muslim names from those of other South Asian faiths, or Pakistani/Bangladeshi names from those indicating other South Asian ethnic origins. — A. Hussain, N. Meer, Framing Muslim Integration, 283

Categorization

  • DEFINE: Explains the correspondence-test/fictitious-applicant method as the gold-standard measure of discrimination, and its key limitation (only the initial hiring stage).
  • XREF: Connects to a methodological debate relevant to this book’s definitional chapter — how measurable anti-Muslim discrimination is when religion is entangled with ethnicity. — connects to: Matched-pair field experiments provide the strongest evidence of hiring discrimination — Runnymede Trust (ed. Farah Elahi & Omar Khan), Islamophobia: Still a Challenge for Us…, 278; Racism scholarship’s biologistic paradigms long excluded anti-Muslim discrimination as unclassifiable — A. Hussain, N. Meer, Framing Muslim Integration, 588; Religious identity can be racialized when signifiers trigger profiling (+2 more)

Broader Connections

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