Methodological problems associated with research on unfair discrimination against racial minorities

Measuring the impact of programs that challenge the public stigma of mental illness

“…Insights from services research (Wells, Miranda et al, 2004), social psychology (Morawski, 2000; Stone, Hosoda et al, 2008), and community psychology (Barnes, 1997; Trickett, 2009) provide useful insights for research that evaluates stigma change. In this light, we review an essential ingredient to research of anti-stigma programs: community-based participatory research.…”

Global Social Tolerance Index and multi-method country rankings sensitivity

“…Similar to gender, equal minority group treatment may indicate an ability to operate according to expected global business norms. Stone, Hosoda, Lukaszewski, and Phillips (2008) examined some problems of current minority discrimination research, including questionable measures, non-representative samples, and experimental situations that provide "hints and cues that govern the participants' perceptions of his or her role and of the experimenter's hypotheses" (Rosenthal & Rosnow, 1991: 115), thus limiting research validity. Wrench (2011) further noted crosscountry data comparability problems.…”

Non-Discrimination in Human Resources Management as a Moral Obligation

“…This gap is puzzling indeed, and many social scientists have come up with explanations for it. Discrimination in the labour market has been analysed not only by political and moral philosophers (Sher, 1975), but also by legal theorists (Bell, 2003(Bell, , 2004Dworkin, 1977), economists (Arrow, 1973;Becker, 1957;Stiglitz, 1974) sociologists (Weil, 2005;Wilson, 1996), social psychologists (Bobo and Fox, 2003), researchers in management in general (James and Wooten, 2006) and in human resources management (Holzer, 1997;Shore et al, 2008;Stone et al, 2008) in particular.…”

“…Some authors have pointed out that many social-scientific accounts of discrimination are not robust. Stone et al (2008) have argued that much research on attitudinal biases and unfair discrimination, particularly in the fields of human resources management and social psychology, suffers from a number of methodological problems, which adversely affects the validity of this research. Among the problems they point to are the use of obtrusive measure (for example, participants can too easily discern the hypotheses that are tested and therefore answer in a socially desirable way), the use of non-representative samples such as undergraduate students who are supposed to represent professional hiring managers, and a lack of mundane realism, that is, events in the experimental setting are unlikely to be encountered in natural settings.…”

“…Among the problems they point to are the use of obtrusive measure (for example, participants can too easily discern the hypotheses that are tested and therefore answer in a socially desirable way), the use of non-representative samples such as undergraduate students who are supposed to represent professional hiring managers, and a lack of mundane realism, that is, events in the experimental setting are unlikely to be encountered in natural settings. Interestingly, Stone et al (2008) mention a research project (Bertrand and Mullainathan, 2004), which is identical to the French one I refer to in Section ''Dimension of the problem: observed discrimination on the labour market'' (Amadieu, 2005), but set in the U.S. According to their analysis, it does not suffer from any of these weaknesses.…”