Adriana Chavez

Adriana Chavez

Word Count:525

Inequality Quiz

The article, "African American, Hispanic, and White Beliefs about Black/White Inequality" explores how Hispanics, Blacks, and Whites feel about the gap of inequality between blacks and whites. This research gathered data from the General Social Surveys (GSS) that run from 1977-2004 to determine if the beliefs of people of people that include non-Hispanics has changed when it comes to black/white inequality from the 1990's to the early 2000's. It's important to note that participants of these surveys went from 1,000 (1970's) to 3,000(2004) whose demographic consisted of 18 years and above, which yielded high respondence rates (74-84%). The evaluation of the data took into consideration dependent and independent variables. The dependent variables considered questions like the causes of the differences that cause blacks to have lower incomes, jobs, etc. when compared to whites. Four options were then given to respond yes or no to; A. related to discrimination, B. related to in-born ability, C. related to the opportunity at education, and D. related to motivation of the black individual. Two of the options were "person-centered" and the other two were "Structuralist." Findings showed that whites and blacks who answered yes to the structuralist options were in the high 60 percentage wise while Hispanics show a lower 60 percentage. In the case of those who answered yes to person-centered options, Whites came at the highest with 88.6% and Hispanics and Blacks had a difference of 2.2 percent with the former at 81% and the latter at 79.2%. Conversely, "no" answers to structuralism and person-centered yielded lower percentage rates and were not aligned like the yes answers. In all this, the independent variables (coded identification) measured were race and age(years). Overall, evaluations showed that non-Hispanics continue to believe less, that the cause of inequality among whites/blacks has to do with the person while the belief seems to be increasing with whites.

The article, "Race, Ethnicity and the Quality of Life in America, 1972-2008" looks at how one's race/ethnicity plays a role in the sense of the life people live. To measure this in a conceptualized way an ordinal scale and partial proportional odds model whose date is taken from (GSS) were used. The things that researchers used to determine the quality of race/ethnicities were martial happiness, overall happiness, health status, and trust (dependent variables). Although religious attendance was not a factor measured it did seem to have a significant in how participants felt about their overall happiness. Independent variables important to this study was race. Findings showed that whites continue to lead a better-quality life than their African American counterparts and the gap is significant which was true even years back. An interesting factor that contributes to black individual's overall happiness was when they gained something whereas when a person had they a lose they experienced a diminished sense of trust. Unsurprisingly, other races and Latinos had a lower quality of life than Whites. In the case of Latinos, researchers theorize that the lower quality of life may be due to this could be because many Latinos may identify as white. However, the problem with using conceptualized models to determine the quality of life of different races is that people experience things different, perceive it differently, and traits of people within communities are harder to measure.