Quote:
Originally Posted by itshotinvegas
I think this poses serious and legitimate criticism of the vast amount of "resume" studies. It also supports the contention that there is racial bias, it just might not be to the extent almost all those other studies assumed. The whole thing is worth reading.
I assume when you say "resume" studies you only mean specifically audit studies where the operational variable is the name of the applicant, the inference is to the race of the applicant, and the interpretation is that differential treatment signals racial bias? There are resume studies where the methodological issues here don't apply, e.g. where the inference is to
gender, rather than race. There are other variations as well.
That said, I agree it's important to be aware of these issues, but I don't think they invalidate these studies at all, they just demonstrate that it's important to think carefully about methods and about how to interpret results. I should have written more about this in the thread on
data, evidence, and ideas, from the playground. This kind of thing is why Becker is such a brilliant writer on sociological research methods.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gaddis
However, the majority of black parents do not name their children using distinctive first names. For example, from 1994 to 2012 in New York state, only 15 names were used by black mothers more than 3,000 times. Most of these 15 names were commonly given by both black and sociological white mothers: Anthony, Ashley, Joshua, Kayla. Only one of these 15 names was more commonly given by black rather than white mothers: Isaiah. Overall, only 18.9 percent of black children born in New York during this period have a name that is racially distinctive as black (more commonly given by black rather than white mothers).
So, this is important if you're trying to extrapolate from the results of studies to measures of the extent of inequality, but it's not important if you're just trying to learn something about biases. An audit study comparing
Emily and Greg to Lakisha and Jamal is still revealing something interesting about how people perceive different names.
It's interesting to compare the results of that study (or
this one, with a similar method) to the results of
another study which used the last names Jefferson and Washington to try to signal race instead, and which did not find evidence of bias. Particularly, thinking about the differences is a good way to get a feel for the problem of interpretation.
The articles which found evidence of bias used first names which are probably fairly strong signals (even if not representative): Lakisha, Jamal, DeAndre. The article which did not find evidence of bias used last names which
are more likely to belong to black Americans (Jefferson, Washington), but perhaps do not signal as strongly? That is, what's relevant is people's perception of the racial significance of a name, not it's actual significance. It seems quite possible that a lot of resume readers are unaware of the correlations of the last names. I think you could infer something interesting about racial stereotypes from this. Perhaps names like DeAndre are familiar to people via stereotypes in a way that names like Jefferson are not (despite the Jeffersons? The ages of the respondents might be relevant...)
But another interesting idea is that names are markers of social and economic status as well, which is certainly tied to race in an interesting way but might not entirely reduce to race? The complex relation between race and SES is highlighted in the paper you linked:
Quote:
Names more commonly given by highly educated black mothers (e.g., Jalen and Nia) are less likely to be perceived as black than names given by less educated black mothers (e.g., DaShawn and Tanisha).
What's interesting here is that this is evidence of the fact that perceived "blackness" is stereotypically linked with being poorer, or less educated. The authors of your study discuss this relationship between race and social class, and I think it's a really interesting one.
Quote:
A second important factor determining what racial cues a first name may signal is the correlation between parental SES and names. Using birth record data from California, Fryer and Levitt (2004) find that “[b]lacker names are associated with lower-income zip codes [and] lower levels of parental education” (p. 786). Moreover, although there are fewer instances of unique naming patterns among white parents, these unique names are still correlated with SES in the New York birth record data. Because both race and SES influence parental naming practices, the racial perception from a name may be biased by the SES-based naming practices.
There's an interesting interpretation possible where the relevant signal is that a name is
atypical (re: "unique naming patterns"). Obviously "atypicality" is a culturally contingent judgement, subject to all sorts of biasing factors connected to ethnocentrism. The hypothesis would be that names which are perceived as more unusual are assumed to be less educated, lower status, less desirable. Under this hypothesis, it is not
exclusively a racial phenomenon; the theory would also apply to other resume studies that use names associated with immigrants (e.g.
here).
I personally find this interpretation pretty convincing, and it's certainly a more complicated story than one of racial bias. But it's also not an interpretation where racial bias isn't a factor. Perceptions of immigrants, for example, are also racialized. But it is an explanation in which racial stereotypes and biases connected to race play out in a larger context with other ethnocentric tendencies.
