Department of Public Health, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Campus Universitário Trindade, Florianópolis, SC, Brazil.
Department of Sociology, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC, USA.
Soc Sci Med. 2020 Nov;265:113321. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113321. Epub 2020 Aug 27.
Studies linking discrimination to poor mental and physical health constitute one of the most robust branches of health inequities research. For more than two decades, and in more than a dozen countries, scholars working in this field have used the Everyday Discrimination Scale (EDS) to assess perceptions of discrimination. Two recent studies (Harnois et al., 2020; Harnois et al., 2019) cast doubt on the instrument's psychometric equivalence across diverse social groups, however.
Our study builds on these previous analyses using a larger and more ethnically and geographically diverse sample of adults in the US, the Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiology Surveys.
Multi-group Confirmatory Factor Analyses were carried out to compare the configural, metric, and scalar structures of the EDS.
Analyzing perceptions of racial/ethnic discrimination, we find a lack of equivalence across race/ethnicity, consistent with previous research. Reports of general mistreatment are found to be equivalent across gender-based groups, but not across race/ethnicity, age- or education-based groups.
Our study provides further evidence that the EDS should be used with caution, particularly when assessing general perceptions of discrimination, and particularly when making cross-group comparisons. Measurement invariance is required to effectively assess the relationship between discrimination and health; further refinement of the scale may be needed to achieve this goal.
将歧视与心理健康和身体健康不良联系起来的研究构成了健康不平等研究中最具活力的分支之一。二十多年来，在十几个国家，该领域的学者一直在使用日常歧视量表（EDS）来评估对歧视的看法。然而，最近的两项研究（Harnois 等人，2020 年；Harnois 等人，2019 年）对该工具在不同社会群体中的心理测量等效性提出了质疑。
我们的研究使用来自美国的更大、更具种族和地域多样性的成年人群体——合作精神流行病学调查的数据，对这些先前的分析进行了扩展。
进行多组验证性因素分析，以比较 EDS 的配置、度量和标度结构。
分析种族/族裔歧视的看法，我们发现种族/族裔之间存在不平等，这与之前的研究一致。基于性别的群体报告的一般虐待是等效的，但基于种族/族裔、年龄或教育的群体则不然。
我们的研究进一步证明，EDS 应该谨慎使用，特别是在评估一般歧视看法时，特别是在进行跨群体比较时。为了有效地评估歧视与健康之间的关系，需要进行测量不变性；为了实现这一目标，可能需要进一步改进该量表。
