Pop culture resentment: testing existing and alternative measures of white racial attitudes

ABSTRACT

Understanding white Americans’ attitudes toward Black Americans is crucial in US public opinion. However, survey measurement of these attitudes is hampered by social desirability bias, low discriminant validity, and the potential for heightened demand characteristics and backlash. I propose a new measure: music genre preference. Consistent preference for genres historically and popularly linked to white culture over those linked to Black culture may partly reflect white Americans’ attitudes toward Black Americans. Using four online surveys comparing the performance of racial resentment, stereotype measures, and genre preference on social desirability, predictive and discriminant validity, and research awareness, I find that genre preference either outperforms or matches the established measures on these criteria. Genre preference thus provides a viable alternative for measuring white Americans’ attitudes toward Black Americans, and potentially other group attitudes in both the United States and other cultures. This also provides an example of sensitive question design using proxies that elicit attitudes without discomforting the survey taker or alerting them to the purpose of the study.

KEYWORDS:

• Racial attitudes
• public opinion
• survey research
• American politics
• methods

Data availability

Replication code and data for this article is available at https://osf.io/9k3up/

Research with human subjects

This research was reviewed and approved as exempt by the US Naval Academy Human Research Protection Program, USNA.2019.0024.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Ash Elkins, Clare Evett, Alexander Huang, Josie Rogers, and Elijah Smith for their assistance in coding the qualitative data presented in this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In order to preserve a similar survey length, participants in the control condition were asked four questions about child-rearing values (authoritarianism).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a US Naval Academy Volgenau Fellowship.