Studying Identities with Experiments: Weighing the Risk of Posttreatment Bias Against Priming Effects

Scholars from across the social sciences argue that identities – such as race, ethnicity, and gender – are highly influential over individuals’ attitudes, actions, and evaluations. Experiments are becoming particularly integral for allowing identity scholars to explain how these social attachments s...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of experimental political science Vol. 7; no. 1; pp. 56 - 60
Main Authors Klar, Samara, Leeper, Thomas, Robison, Joshua
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Washington Cambridge University Press 01.01.2020
Subjects
Bias
Ethnic identity
Ethnicity
Experiments
Heterogeneity
Identification
Immigration
Intellectuals
Partisanship
Political behavior
Political science
Preferences
Priming
Race
Researchers
Social sciences
United States > US
New Jersey
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Summary:Scholars from across the social sciences argue that identities – such as race, ethnicity, and gender – are highly influential over individuals’ attitudes, actions, and evaluations. Experiments are becoming particularly integral for allowing identity scholars to explain how these social attachments shape our political behavior. In this letter, we draw attention to how identity scholars should approach the common practice of assessing moderators, measuring control variables, and detecting effect heterogeneity using covariates. Special care must be taken when deciding where to place measures of demographic covariates in identity-related experiments, as these cases pose unique challenges from how scholars traditionally approach experimental design. We argue in this letter that identity scholars, particularly those whose subjects identify as women or minorities, are often right to measure covariates of interest posttreatment.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
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ISSN:2052-2630
2052-2649
DOI:10.1017/XPS.2019.26