Digital Mind 🧠

🪵 The Threshold

Single-question survey items cannot isolate Islamophobia from confounds

Properties2
tagsja-picks, question, xref, seed, factual_claims, primary_study, singleton, recurring, category/factual-claims
aliases@bleich_what_2011, loc. 50

4 min read

Single-question survey items cannot isolate Islamophobia from confounds

Evidence

The fewer questions asked in surveys, focus groups, or interviews, the more difficult it is to measure the consistency, intensity, and nature of Islamophobic sentiments. Any arguments about Islamophobia that rely on a single survey question should be viewed with skepticism. To the extent that a question is extremely direct—such as asking respondents to rate their level of sympathy or antipathy toward specific groups—it is more likely to be a useful indicator than less direct questions. Indirect questions can be revealing, but they also run the risk of having an ambiguous relation with the underlying phenomenon. The World Values Surveys, for instance, ask: “Which of the following groups would you NOT like to have as a neighbor?” Answering “Muslim” may reflect Islamophobia, but this is like diagnosing cirrhosis based on jaundice—there is a high probability that it is correlated with the underlying phenomenon, but the indicator may also be caused by something else entirely (a racist’s desire not to live next to someone who is likely to have dark skin, or an atheist’s desire not to live next to a religious person). Other surveys ask questions such as: “Would you favor the building of a mosque in your neighborhood?” Negative answers may indicate Islamophobia, but they may also reflect concerns with other factors, such as a desire to minimize traffic disruption. Responses are thus most revealing when compared with attitudes toward building churches, big box stores, police stations, or other non-Islamic construction projects; only then can survey questions like these illuminate the specific effect of the Islamic or Muslim component of the equation. — Erik Bleich, What Is Islamophobia and How Much Is…, 50

Categorization

  • QUESTION: Directly relevant to the reading purpose: Bleich sketches exactly how a mosque-building question can be made to isolate the Islamic component (differencing against churches/big-box stores) — empiricist moves that bear on whether the evidentiary burden is actually surmountable.
  • XREF: Connects to audit-study / field-experiment methodology for detecting discrimination (Adida-Laitin-Valfort, correspondence tests); also to the defamation-vs-discrimination debate in ch0’s definitions thread. — connects to: Single indirect survey questions cannot cleanly isolate anti-Muslim sentiment from other intolerance — Erik Bleich, What Is Islamophobia and How Much Is…, 50; Single-question survey measures of Islamophobia are unreliable and causally ambiguous — Erik Bleich, What Is Islamophobia and How Much Is…, 50; Survey indicators of Islamophobia need comparison baselines to isolate the Muslim component. — Erik Bleich, What Is Islamophobia and How Much Is…, 50 (+5 more)
  • SEED: The cirrhosis/jaundice metaphor raises an essay question: what would a clean ‘differential’ audit design for anti-Muslim discrimination look like, and why do so few published studies use differenced comparisons?
  • recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source

Broader Connections

✉️

Backlinks