Intersectionality, Contextual Specificity, and Everyday Discrimination: Assessing the Difficulty Associated With Identifying a Main Reason for Discrimination Among Racial/Ethnic Minority Respondents

The Everyday Discrimination Scale is the most commonly used instrument to assess discrimination. The survey asks respondents about a range of negative interpersonal experiences and then asks them to provide a single main reason for all these experiences. Theories of intersectionality cast doubt on the idea that marginalized individuals generally perceive a single reason for the discrimination they encounter. We analyze data from 23 cognitive interviews with racial/ethnic minority adults to assess the degree of difficulty respondents have in assessing the main reason for their mistreatment, the sources of this difficulty, and potential consequences. Of the 21 respondents who reported experiencing some form of everyday discrimination, 43 percent encountered some difficulty in identifying a single main reason for their experiences; 42 percent of women who perceived some form of discrimination evidence significant frustration in identifying a main reason. Analyses show that, by requiring respondents to identify a single reason for their experiences of discrimination, the resulting data likely provide underestimates—and potentially biased estimates—of particular forms of discrimination.