Establishing construct validity evidence for regional measures of explicit and implicit racial bias.

Abstract

Large-scale data collection has enabled social scientists to examine psychological constructs at broad, regional levels. However, because constructs and their measures initially operationalized at the individual level may have qualitatively and quantitatively different properties at other levels of analysis, the validity of constructs must be established when they are operationalized at new levels. To this end, the current research presents evidence of construct validity for explicit and implicit racial bias at region levels. Following classic measurement theory, we examine the substantive, structural, and external evidence of construct validity for regional biases. We do so with responses from ϳ2 million Black and White North Americans collected over 13 years. Though implicit measures typically demonstrate low retest reliability at the individual level, our analyses reveal conventionally acceptable levels of retest reliability at the highest levels of regional aggregation. Additionally, whereas previous meta-analyses find relatively low explicit-implicit correlations at the individual level, the present research uncovered strong explicitimplicit correlations at regional levels. The findings have implications for how we interpret measures of racial bias at regional levels.

Toward the use of approach/avoidance tendencies as attitude measures: Individual‐ and group‐level variability of the ingroup bias

“…Payne et al () reviewed empirical evidence showing that effects at the individual level are generally unstable (Gawronski, Morrison, Phills, & Galdi, ) and only weakly associated with individual differences (e.g., in predicting discriminatory behaviors; Greenwald et al, ; Oswald et al, ). On the contrary, at the aggregate level (e.g., IAT scores aggregated as a function of US states), these effects are stable (Payne et al, ; see also Hehman, Calanchini, Flake, & Leitner, ) and strongly associated with situational variables (e.g., city‐level; Zerhouni et al, ; region‐level; Hehman et al, ; county/state‐level; Orchard & Price, ; Payne et al, ). Authors concluded that these effects would be mostly due to the situational accessibility of concepts (i.e., conveyed by racist institutions and cultures), what the authors called the “systemic bias”.…”

Understanding Implicit Bias: Putting the Criticism into Perspective

“…See Hehman et al . () for discussion of pertinent psychometric questions about these studies and their novel approach to the use of implicit measures.…”

Identifying the domains of ideological similarities and differences in attitudes

“…We used both the implicit and explicit measures to estimate the size of ideological differences and similarities on these attitudes. At the aggregate level, there tends to be a strong relationship between implicit and explicit attitudes (Hehman, Calanchini, Flake, & Leitner, 2019)-suggesting our analyses, which are also at an aggregate level, should produce similar trends for both types of measures.…”