Friday, March 05, 2010

Race and alienation

An alienation score was calculated for MIDUS repondents based on the following items: feels betrayed, deceived; feels exploited; feels mistreated; believes others wish him/her to fail; sees self as target of false rumors; and feels unlucky. Here are the means by race/ethnicity (N = 3,988):

Mean alienation score

White 5.08
Black 6.03*
Amerindian 5.70*
Asian 5.79
Mexican 5.26 

* significantly higher than whites

Blacks are slightly more than half a standard deviation above whites--a moderate difference. In a twin study, the heritability for a MMPI scale of alienation was .61, but the environmental component might be larger for racial minorities.

1 comment:

  1. Look on the bright side: Since alienation tends to produce criminal behavior and the ethnicity surrounding the minority is the Other, hate crimes can be perpetrated and attributed simply to the random chance of one ethnicity encountering the Other in daily life.

    So the alienation can be counter balanced by the opportunities to get your yayas out!

    ReplyDelete

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