Harmonizing Assessments of Everyday Racial Discrimination Experiences: The Multigroup Everyday Racial Discrimination Scale (MERDS)

Abstract

Reliable and valid assessment of direct racial discrimination experiences in everyday life is critical to understanding one key determinant of ethnoracial minority health and health disparities. To address psychometric limitations of existing instruments and to harmonize the assessment of everyday racial discrimination, the new Multigroup Everyday Racial Discrimination Scale (MERDS) was developed and validated. This investigation included 1355 college and graduate students of color (Mage = 21.54, 56.0% women). Factor analyses were performed to provide evidence for structural validity of everyday racial discrimination scores. Item response theory modeling was used to investigate item difficulty relative to the level of everyday racial discrimination, and measurement error conditioned on the construct. MERDS scores were reliable, supported construct unidimensionality, and distinguished individuals who reported low to very high frequency of everyday racial discrimination. Results on the associations with racial identity and psychopathology symptoms, and utility of the scale are discussed.

Effects of Racial Discrimination on Stress, Negative Emotions, and Alcohol Craving: A Registered Report of a Virtual Reality Experiment

“…Racial microaggression did not reliably predict negative affect, psychological distress, and alcohol use outcomes over and above overt everyday racial discrimination among African American/Black, Hispanic/Latinx, and Asian American college students. Despite using the same microaggression typology for scale development, self-reported surveys have not supported the conceptual structure of this construct (see Lui & Kamata, 2023 for critique). Harmonizing items across the Everyday Discrimination Sale, Racial Microaggression Scale, and Racial and Ethnic Microaggression Scale, researchers identified many overlapping items.…”