Martiniello Billie, Verhaeghe Pieter-Paul
Department of Sociology, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Brussels, Belgium.
Front Sociol. 2023 Mar 2;8:1125384. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2023.1125384. eCollection 2023.
The aim of this research is to look into how signals carried by names can contribute to the explanation of why rental discrimination is measured. Ethnic discrimination on the rental housing market is a widespread phenomenon that is increasingly captured in an objective way by means of correspondence studies. This methodology assumes that the trigger for the measured discriminatory behavior is the signal of ethnic origin in names. Nonetheless, previous research found that names also contain other signals such as religiosity, social class and educational level.
The current study relates data of 3.753 correspondence tests on the Flemish rental housing market in Belgium to survey data about the perception of the used names in the correspondence tests in terms of ethnic origin, gender, religiosity, social class and educational level. By doing so, we can set a step in the direction of why discrimination is measured.
We find that realtors discriminate based on the perception of a name as religious, which we describe as religious taste-based discrimination. Besides, we also find indications for statistical discrimination. For landlords, the perception of a name as non-European increases discrimination, indicating ethnic taste-based discrimination.
本研究旨在探究名字所传递的信号如何有助于解释为何会出现住房租赁歧视现象。住房租赁市场上的种族歧视是一种普遍存在的现象，通过信函研究这种客观方式，该现象越来越多地被捕捉到。这种方法假定，所测歧视行为的触发因素是名字中的种族起源信号。尽管如此，先前的研究发现，名字还包含其他信号，如宗教信仰、社会阶层和教育水平。
本研究将比利时弗拉芒地区住房租赁市场上3753次信函测试的数据，与关于信函测试中所使用名字在种族起源、性别、宗教信仰、社会阶层和教育水平方面的认知的调查数据相关联。通过这样做，我们能够朝着解释为何会出现歧视迈出一步。
我们发现，房地产经纪人会基于对名字具有宗教色彩的认知进行歧视，我们将其描述为基于宗教偏好的歧视。此外，我们还发现了统计性歧视的迹象。对于房东而言，对名字具有非欧洲特征的认知会加剧歧视，这表明存在基于种族偏好的歧视。
