Edited by Azizi Powell
This pancocojams post presents an excerpt of a 2017 pdf file about Americans' racial perception of names. This research was conducted by S. Michael Gaddis, University of California, Los Angeles and is entitled "How Black Are Lakisha and Jamal? Racial Perceptions from Names Used in Correspondence Audit Studies".
The content of this post is presented for sociological and etymological purposes.
All copyrights remain with their owners.
Thanks to S. Michael Gaddis for this research. Thanks to all those who participated in this research and all those who are quoted in this post.
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PANCOCOJAMS EDITOR'S NOTE
As a reminder, I feature excerpts of articles, pdf files, and books as a means of highlighting those writings and as a means of encouraging people to read the entire work, if possible.
This pancocojams post is part of an ongoing focus in this blog on African American names, and names and naming practices, particularly in the United States. Click the tags below for additional pancocojams post on these subjects.
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PDF EXCERPT
From https://www.sociologicalscience.com/download/vol-/september/SocSci_v4_469to489.pdf
S. Michael Gaddis
University of California, Los Angeles
"How Black Are Lakisha and Jamal? Racial Perceptions from Names Used in Correspondence Audit Studies
Abstract: Online correspondence audit studies have emerged as the primary method to examine racial discrimination. Although audits use distinctive names to signal race, few studies scientifically
examine data regarding the perception of race from names. Different names treated as black or white may be perceived in heterogeneous ways. I conduct a survey experiment that asks respondents to identify the race they associate with a series of names. I alter the first names given to each respondent and inclusion of last names. Names more commonly given by highly educated black mothers (e.g., Jalen and Nia) are less likely to be perceived as black than names given by less educated black mothers (e.g., DaShawn and Tanisha). The results suggest that a large body of social science evidence on racial discrimination operates under a misguided assumption that all black names are alike, and the findings from correspondence audits are likely sensitive to name selection.
Keywords: racial discrimination; inequality; names; audit studies; experiments
MODERN social science evidence of racial discrimination stems mostly from a type of field experiment known as an audit study, which matches candidates on all characteristics except race to examine racial differences in outcomes. Originally developed in the 1960s to capture more elusive forms of racial discrimination in the post–Civil Rights era, modern audit studies have shifted from the in-person to the correspondence method, which uses names to signal the race of hypothetical subjects. With few exceptions, correspondence audits regularly find lower phone and/or email response rates for applications with black names compared to white names in both employment and housing (Gaddis 2015; Hanson et al. 2016; Hogan
and Berry 2011). Researchers have continued to find evidence of racial discrimination even as correspondence audits have expanded to include a broader domain of actors, such as politicians, prospective roommates, public officials, and health care professionals (Butler and Broockman 2011; Einstein and Glick 2017; Gaddis and Ghoshal 2017; Giulietti, Tonin, and Vlassopoulos 2015; Sharma, Mitra, and Stano 2015).
Such correspondence audits enable researchers to circumvent a number of critiques of the in-person method (Heckman 1998; Heckman and Siegelman 1993), collect larger samples, and reduce research costs. However, researchers also lose the ability to more directly convey race through appearance and interaction and
instead rely solely on names to signal race. The vast majority of the recent evidence on racial discrimination hinges on individuals’ racial perceptions from these names.
An exhaustive search of correspondence audits (conducted by both mail and internet) that use names to signal race yields 89 studies in published or working
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paper form since 1970. The occurrence of these studies has accelerated in recent years (72 studies, or 81 percent, have been published or otherwise made available since 2010).1 Researchers across a variety of disciplines—sociology, economics, political science, psychology, and management—have published these studies in some of the top generalist journals. To fully capture the gravity of how names inform a scientific understanding of racial prejudice, discrimination, and stereotypes, we can expand the search of the scientific literature beyond correspondence audits to also include laboratory, vignette, and other experiments, which easily surpasses 250 studies since the year 2000.2
Unfortunately, no research has systematically investigated the validity of using names to signal race. In correspondence audits, researchers seem to assume a consensus on what constitutes distinctively black and white names and that any one “black” name should yield similar results as any other “black” name. How
ever, scientific explanations of how researchers select black and white names are woefully lacking....
This is particularly troubling because name-based correspondence audits have become the leading method of
providing evidence of racial discrimination.
Although the research base clearly shows that race can be signaled through names and that using names as a signal of race can successfully capture some version of racial discrimination, it is unclear whether people actually perceive the signal of race in the same way across the variety of names used in past research. At least 3 characteristics of a name may influence an individual’s perception of race from
that name: (1) the population racial composition of a first name, (2) the population socioeconomic status (SES) composition of a first name, and (3) the population racial composition of a last name. Although some racial discrimination research has been concerned with the second characteristic (Bertrand and Mullainathan 2004; Gaddis 2015), nearly none has paid attention to the first and third characteristics.
Studies that use names to signal race rely on the assumption that there are first names among the population that are unique to certain races. Thus, if a name, such as Jamal, more frequently belongs to a black person, the general population should recognize that name as black. Since at least the 1960s, a small percentage of black parents have chosen certain first names for their children at much higher frequencies than white parents, making these names racially distinctive (Fryer and Levitt 2004;
Lieberson 2000; Lieberson and Mikelson 1995). However, the majority of black parents do not name their children using distinctive first names. For example, from 1994 to 2012 in New York state, only 15 names were used by black mothers more than 3,000 times. Most of these 15 names were commonly given by both black and
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white mothers: Anthony, Ashley, Joshua, Kayla. Only one of these 15 names was more commonly given by black rather than white mothers: Isaiah. Overall, only 18.9 percent of black children born in New York during this period have a name that is racially distinctive as black (more commonly given by black rather than white mothers).
Moreover, data from New York suggest that the most distinctively black names are not exclusively used by blacks. For example, names such as Jamal and Latoya belong to children with black mothers at rates of 80 percent and 84 percent, respectively, leaving 20 percent of Jamals and 16 percent of Latoyas as nonblack or multiracial. Other “black” names such as Keisha and Leroy have lower rates (56 percent and 61 percent, respectively). All four of these names have been used to signal black applicants in multiple correspondence audits.
Taken together, these two issues should make it clear that, at best, first names can only be imperfect proxies of race. Researchers take a shortcut by first using a specific subset of names and then taking a continuous variable of racial naming practices and turning it into a binary (i.e., white name or black name). Thus, even if data on actual population naming practices by race could perfectly predict perceptions of race from these names, we would expect that, for instance, 20 percent of the time Jamal would be perceived as nonblack. However, individual perceptions may not perfectly align with reality, as one often-overlooked small sample pretest finding from Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004) suggests.3
A second important factor determining what racial cues a first name may signal is the correlation between parental SES and names. Using birth record data from California, Fryer and Levitt (2004) find that “[b]lacker names are associated with lower-income zip codes [and] lower levels of parental education” (p. 786). Moreover, although there are fewer instances of unique naming patterns among white parents, these unique names are still correlated with SES in the New York birth record data.
Because both race and SES influence parental naming practices, the racial perception from a name may be biased by the SES-based naming practices. Whereas some find that individuals’ racial perceptions from names are not biased by these SES-based practices (Bertrand and Mullainathan 2004), other research suggests this may not be true in all instances (Figlio 2005; Gaddis 2015; Kirschenman and Neckerman 1991).
Finally, researchers have focused minimal attention on last name selection with regard to race. However, publicly available U.S. Census data show that only nine last names among the most frequently occurring 1,000 are majority black, with another 15 last names registering at 40 percent to 50 percent black (U.S. Census Bureau 2012). Earlier correspondence audits often mixed “black” first names with both predominantly black last names and predominantly white last names within a study (Hanson and Hawley 2011; Milkman, Akinola, and Chugh 2012), whereas more recent studies often match first and last names by race (Gaddis 2016; Hanson et al. 2016). The effect of this selection on outcomes in correspondence audits is not only unknown but heretofore unquestioned.
One additional potential wrinkle in signaling race through names remains: the characteristics of the individual receiving the signal. For instance, we might expect that blacks would be more familiar with black names generally and thus more likely to recognize a particular name as black, independent of the SES associations
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of that name. Other characteristics, such as an individual’s age, gender, and SES might matter as well. Although no correspondence audits directly acknowledge this issue, the implications are clear. If whites are overrepresented in a particular audit context (e.g., real estate agents) and also less likely to receive the racial signals sent by researchers, we may underestimate true discrimination rates by using poorly performing names.
Overall, a body of research suggests that further examination of racial perceptions from names will substantially improve our understanding of existing discrepancies in racial discrimination research and help lead to future laboratory, field, and survey experiments with higher internal validity.
Unfortunately, few studies have examined different perceptions of race from names and none do so in an experimental framework. The present research stands to make an important contribution to the social sciences by providing the first scientific evidence on perceptions of race from names. I proceed by conducting a survey experiment and examining a number of research questions on individual racial perceptions from names.
[...]
Selecting Names to Test
I selected names for this study using New York state birth record data for all births from 1994 to 2012 obtained from the New York State Department of Health to examine population-level race and SES characteristics.4 These data separately list the total number of births by (1) name and mother’s race and (2) name and mother’s education. This data structure allowed me, for example, to choose two names
similar in terms of mother’s race but different in terms of mother’s education—in other words, a black lower-SES name and a black middle- to upper-SES name. Two examples used in this study are DaQuan and Jabari; 91.8 percent of children named DaQuan and 92.1 percent of children named Jabari are born to black mothers. These names are equal in blackness but vary by mother’s education; only 12.8 percent of mothers who name their child DaQuan have some college or more education, whereas 56.8 percent of mothers who name their child Jabari have some college or more education.
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Results
Descriptive Results
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There is much variation in congruent perception rates within each set of racialized names. For black names (Figure 1), the respondents were least likely to congruently perceive the names Bria, Sade, Kaylah, Lyric, and Jasmine8 when matched
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with a black last name. All of these names were perceived as black among less than 65 percent of the respondents. Even when black last names were included, 20 of the 80 black names (25 percent) were perceived as black among less than 75 percent of the respondents, indicating poor choices for use in experiments signaling race.
Conversely, congruent perception rates were quite high for the names DaShawn, Tanisha, Tremayne, Jamal, and Daquan. All of these names were perceived as black among more than 95 percent of the respondents. When black last names were included, 30 of the 80 black names (37.5 percent) were perceived as black among more than 90 percent of the respondents, indicating very good choices for use in field experiments signaling race. The congruent perception rate across all black names is 75.0 percent when given no last name, 82.5 percent when given a black last name, and 66.5 percent when given a white last name.
For white names (Figure 2), the respondents were least likely to congruently perceive the names Cheyanne, Maxwell, Mayer, Irvin, and Chloe when matched with a white last name. All of these names were perceived as white among less than 85 percent of the respondents. Only Cheyanne (55.6 percent) and Maxwell (74.3
percent) were perceived as white among less than 75 percent of the respondents, indicating poor choices for use in field experiments signaling race. Conversely, congruent perception rates were extremely high for the names Katelyn, Hunter, Claire, Jake, and Seth. All of these names were perceived as white among more than 97 percent of the respondents. When white last names were included, 67 of the 80 white names (83.8 percent) were perceived as white among more than 90 percent of the respondents, indicating very good choices for use in experiments signaling race. The respondent congruent perception rate for all white names is 87.3 percent when given no last name, 92.4 percent when given a white last name, 67.9 percent when given a black last name, and 17.8 percent when given a Hispanic last name.
One other significant variation that stands out from these figures comes from differences by mothers’ education. Respondents are much more likely to congruently perceive a black name from mothers with lower education levels like DaShawn, DaQuan, or Lakisha rather than from mothers with higher education levels like Nia, Malcolm, or Malia. Respondents are also much more likely to congruently perceive a white name from mothers with higher education levels like Claire, Jake, or Abigail rather than from mothers with lower education like Cheyanne, Irvin, or Jordy, although the patterns for white names do not appear as strong as for black names.
[...]
Table 3 delves into the raw data and confirms the patterns discussed above. Generally, respondents congruently perceive white names at higher rates than others except when matched with a Hispanic last name. Respondents also congruently perceive male and female white names at equal rates but have less trouble congruently perceiving male rather than female black names. Finally, there’s some evidence that black and white respondents can congruently perceive names that match their own race more readily that those of other races.
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Discussion and Conclusion
In the 1964 Supreme Court case Jacobellis v. Ohio, Justice Potter Stewart famously said “I know it when I see it” in reference to what constitutes pornography. Many scholars seemingly have taken the same tactic when deciding what constitutes a black name: they know it when they see (or hear) it. The underlying assumption that black names comprise a uniform body that signals the same information has dominated the leading method used to investigate racial discrimination since the early 2000s. However, the present research shows that this assumption fails to hold
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up when put under the scientific microscope. Indeed, black names used in previous correspondence audits vary significantly by individual perceptions of race. I find that a number of characteristics of an individual name matter: gender, popularity, type of last name included, and the average level of education of mothers who commonly give that name, among others.
The immediate implications of these findings are obvious: researchers can use this information to select names that signal race more clearly in correspondence audits. Whether researchers select the best-performing names among those I tested or conduct their own pretests before embarking on future correspondence audits, internal validity should increase in future racial discrimination research.
However, we should also question what these results might mean for the current body of discrimination research that is mostly not based on scientific selection of names to signal race. Differences in racial perceptions from names might explain differences in outcomes within and between correspondence audits. A recent trio of correspondence audits highlights this possibility (Darolia et al. 2016; Deming et
al. 2016; Gaddis 2016). Three sets of researchers separately examined the effects of for-profit versus not-for-profit educational credentials in the labor market for black and white job candidates. Despite conducting the three correspondence audits during similar time periods with similar research questions and across many of the same cities, the findings regarding racial discrimination were quite different.
Each chose different names to signal race, with one going the unique route of using generic or “white” first names coupled with “black” last names to signal a black applicant and found no evidence of racial discrimination (Darolia et al. 2016).
Although other differences between these studies exist, the possibility that the racial signal from names might influence correspondence audit outcomes warrants further investigation.
Notes
1 This search, performed in September 2016, examined citation networks from high-profile audit studies, searches through the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Social Science Research Network, and personal correspondence between the author and a number of researchers conducting these studies.
2 A database of this research will be available in the near future at http://www.auditstudies.com.
3 Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004) found that some distinctively black names, Maurice and Jerome in particular, were not perceived as strongly black in a small test sample in Chicago.
4 The choice of New York birth record data is one of convenience. To my knowledge, no national-level data are available. The only other available large-scale, multiyear birth record data come from California. These data are expensive to obtain. Additionally, the racial demographics of New York are closer than California to the national percentages (e.g., blacks are 13.2 percent of the population nationally, 15.9 percent of the population in New York, and only 6.5 percent of the population in California). 1994 through 2012 was the full set of years available from New York at the beginning of this project. Although
racial and SES-based naming practices may vary somewhat across regions, the question of importance is whether racial perceptions from names vary across regions. In supplemental analyses, I test whether respondents from New York vary from respondents in
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the rest of the United States. I find no substantive differences in these analyses (available from author upon request), suggesting that the use of New York data likely has no significant bearing on the results.
5 I treat two names as black even though the New York data show that a plurality of mothers are white who name their children these two names: Jasmine and Kiara. In the case of Jasmine, one previous correspondence audit used the name to signal a black person (Jacquemet and Yannelis 2012). Additionally, both Jasmine and Kiara are listed on Levitt and Dubner’s (2005) top black female names list, increasing the likelihood that either name could be used as a black name in audit studies of racial discrimination.
6 The survey question asks about “race or ethnicity.” For brevity, I refer to this simply as race, even when discussing Hispanic ethnicity.
7 Dropping multiracial responses or treating them as “other” does not affect the substantive findings.
8 The low congruent perception rate of Jasmine is expected because only 33 percent of Jasmines in New York are born to black mothers. Again, because a previous correspondence audit used the name to signal a black person (Jacquemet and Yannelis 2012), I treat the name as black in this study."
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