Education and Understanding Structural Causes for Group Inequalities

Abstract

Group inequalities in the United States are most often attributed to the characteristics of the individuals who belong to these groups; thinking about structural causes of group inequalities is rare. This paper reviews cognitive, cultural, and systemic reasons for this bias. The efficacy of education as a way to increase structural thinking was investigated in two studies of college students' causal thinking about group inequalities. Both studies involved a course on intergroup relations that covered structural sources of racial or ethnic inequalities. Results supported hypotheses that the course would increase structural thinking about racial or ethnic inequality, and that structural thinking would generalize to inequalities not explicitly covered in the course. Both course content and active learning pedagogy were related to structural thinking about inequalities. Active learning was also related to applying structural thinking to targets of change. KEY WORDS: causal attribution, individualism, structural causation, intergroup relationsDiscussions about group inequalities in the United States, whether they take place in the popular press, the political arena, or the academic forum, often involve a debate about the capacity of individuals in different groups to determine their own socioeconomic success. Two opposing explanations typically characterize this debate. One attributes group differences in socioeconomic success to the character, motivation, and dispositions of individuals belonging to various groups. The other explanation, a structural one, asserts that institutions treat different groups of people unequally, making success less attainable for some groups than for others. The 305 0162-895X

Meta-Analysis in Higher Education: An Illustrative Example Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling

“…Note that the 95% intervals for 15 studies in the sample contain or include the summary effect size (e.g., the intervals for the Muthuswamy et al 2006;Gurin et al 2004;and Chang 2002 studies). However, we see that the 95% intervals for a number of other studies lie below the summary effect size (e.g., Antonio 2001), and the intervals for a third group of studies lie above the summary effect size (e.g., Lopez et al 1998); the non-overlap in 95% intervals for the latter two groups of studies signals that the studies in the sample very likely vary substantially in their true effect sizes. In contrast, if the intervals for nearly all of the studies in the sample contained the summary estimate, this would signal that the studies are likely fairly homogenous in terms of their true effect sizes.…”

“…0.28 = 0.73 (SE = 0.11). 4 This estimate is very sensible when we consider the magnitude of the effect size estimates for the Lopez et al (1998), Muthuswamy et al (2006) and Gurin et al (2004) studies in Table 2 (i.e., 0.87, 0.86 and 0.48, respectively). Note, finally, that the estimate of s is approximately 0.025.…”

“…As can be seen the effect size estimates range in value from 0.15 to 2.17, and the standard errors of the estimates range from 0.01 to 0.52. To help understand the meaning of these quantities, consider, for example, the results for the Lopez et al (1998) study. The effect size estimate for this study indicates that the outcome scores for the students in the treatment group were on average approximately 0.87 standard deviations higher than the outcome scores for the students in the control group (with higher scores indicating greater racial understanding or less bias).…”

“…However, three of the studies also involved a cross-racial interaction component (i.e., Lopez et al 1998;Muthuswamy et al 2006;Gurin et al 2002;see Table 2). Thus we now focus on whether we see systematic differences in effect sizes between those studies that focused only on expanding content-based knowledge (C) versus those that also involved cross-racial interaction (CRI) activities.…”

“…Likewise, among the adjusted effect sizes, the two largest are from studies of C ? CRI programs (Lopez et al 1998;Gurin et al 2004).…”