Race of the Interviewer and Perception of Skin Color: Evidence from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality
By Mark E. Hill. American Sociological Review, 2002
172 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The influence of interviewers’ race on skin color classification for white and African American survey respondents is explored using data from the Multi-City Study of Urban inequality (conducted 1992 to 1994). As hypothesized, bivariate and multivariate results reveal a compelling race-of-the-interviewer effect for both black and white respondents: White interviewers reported the skin tones of black respondents as substantially darker than did black interviewers. In turn, black interviewers categorized the skin tones of white respondents as much lighter than did white interviewers. Results also indicate that interviewers perceived greater variation in the skin tones of same-race respondents than among other-race respondents, suggesting that both black and white Americans exhibit relatively limited ability to carefully distinguish the physical characteristics of other-race persons. Finally, results show that unsuccessful attempts to match interviewers and respondents by race may have the unintended consequence of introducing important attenuating biases into analyses involving skin color. Implications for future research are discussed.
Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8d8e89549b2b3303f5b66b9c41d5f04eebb1553f
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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Shades of Race (2016, background): “Because previous work has shown that race affects how observers assess skin tone (Hill, 2002), I considered whether the fact that the same observers coded skin tone and race would bias my results.”
- Hearing Gender: Voice-Based Gender Classification Processes and Transgender Health Inequality (2019, background): “The classification and perception of persons into particular identities can vary based on social contexts, as well as individual characteristics of observers (Herman 2010; Hill 2002) and the observed (Porter, Liebler, and Noon 2016; Willer et al. 2013).”
- Skin-Tone Effects among African Americans: Perceptions and Reality (2006, background): “Evidence from the MCSUI shows that non-black interviewers systematically reported skin tones of black respondents as darker than did black interviewers (Mark E. Hill 2002).”