General discrimination scales miss hate crimes and institutionalized bias

Evidence

The lack of a scale for measuring the spectrum of perceived anti-Muslim discrimination in the United States complicates efforts to understand the associations between anti-Muslim discrimination and health issues among Muslim Americans. General discrimination scales exist, specifically the Everyday Discrimination Scale, which asks respondents about general experiences with mistreatment and then asks participants to select the primary reason they felt they were mistreated (e.g., race, ethnicity, religious identity, or sexual identity) (Williams et al., 1997). The items in this scale measure interpersonal encounters, but do not capture how anti-Muslim discrimination is enacted in the United States, specifically hate crimes and institutionalized forms of anti-Muslim discrimination. — Naheed Ahmed, Measurement of Perceived Interpersonal…, 18

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains what the Everyday Discrimination Scale measures and, crucially, what it does not — interpersonal encounters only, not structural or hate-crime forms.
• XREF: Connects to measurement-validity literature on racial/ethnic discrimination scales (Williams et al., 1997) and to health-disparities research.