The Ohio Discrimination Project

Faculty Coordinator: Vincent J. Roscigno

Coordinating GRA: Griff Tester

The Research Problem to be Addressed

Discrimination is commonly understood in the sociological literature to be an important mechanism in generating inequality between racial and ethnic groups, and between men and women, particularly in relation to employment and residential options. Yet, little sociological research systematically analyzes discrimination itself. The Ohio Discrimination Project, hereafter referred to as ODP, attempts to remedy this gap in the literature by (1) delineating questions pertaining to discrimination that are relevant to the study of stratification, political sociology, sociology of race/ethnicity, sociology of gender, and spatial and labor market processes; (2) collecting detailed data on employment and housing discrimination suits filed with the Ohio Civil Rights Commission from 1988 until 2003; (3) analyzing this data at macro and micro levels, and employing quantitative, qualitative, and comparative analytic techniques. Each of these three project objectives is described below.

 

Relevant Literature

The first task of the practicum and its participants is to ground potential analyses in prior work that touches on the topic of discrimination, and in broader literatures within which the topic of discrimination may be directly relevant. In these regards, there are several literatures from which participants, under the direction of the faculty coordinator, will draw and to which they will ultimately contribute:

 

● Sociology of Workplace, Race, and Gender Stratification: There is a rich and methodologically sophisticated literature pertaining to race/gender stratification at work that usually takes as its analytic focus questions of hiring discrimination, wage inequality, and job mobility (e.g., England et al. 1994; Reskin 1993; Tomaskovic-Devey 1993). Much of this literature quantitatively models these outcomes, controlling for human capital attributes, race and gender composition of workplaces, labor market sectoral attributes, etc., often concluding that discrimination is likely playing a role. Specifically, residuals unexplained by human capital and status attainment models of wage inequality or mobility differences by race or gender for instance are often assumed to be at least partially driven by explicit or subtle discrimination by employers or coworkers. The proposed project and the data it will entail will afford the opportunity to analyze various forms of employment discrimination (e.g., hiring, promotion, firing, sexual harassment, pregnancy, etc.), how it unfolds, who it effects and how, and how it may vary by macro attributes pertaining to labor markets, industrial sectors, and population competitive threat (in this regard, see Blalock 1967).

 

● Residential Segregation: A growing and influential body of work in the race/ethnicity literature deals specifically with the topic of race/ethnic residential segregation. Historical work on the topic tends to focus on discriminatory steering and lending practices by both realtors and banks prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1968 (e.g., Wilson 1978). More contemporary work denotes, in a more systematic and methodologically rigorous manner, spatial and temporal patterns of segregation across and within cities. Such patterns, it has been suggested, are driven by historical settlement patterns, past discriminatory housing and lending laws, and persistent steering by realtors (Massey and Denton 1997; Farley and Frey 1994). Rather than being based on sociological analysis, however, conclusions on actual discriminatory practices by landlords or realtors tends to be based on city-specific racial testing government agencies such as HUD. While certainly useful in a case-analytic sense, such reports seldom delineate what precisely minorities (or women) experience and how discriminators rationalize their behaviors. The data for the proposed practicum allow for such analysis, and on a large and relatively generalizeable sample.

 

● Institutional and Political Mobilization Processes: Along with literature pertaining specifically to workplace stratification and residential inequality, there exists research and theoretical speculation on the consequences of political change in discrimination law on workplace institutional grievance outlets, and on the importance of informal resource mobilization for those with discrimination grievances (e.g., Blankenship 1993; Kelly and Dobbin 1999; Burstein 1991). Here, the focus is not on discriminatory acts, per se, but rather on the potential consequences of legal reforms for how workplaces deal (if at all) with discrimination claims, the consequences for complainants, and how the outcome may vary depending on the presence or absence of other political actors (e.g., lawyers, women’s groups, civil rights organizations) in a particular dispute. The data for the project, discussed next, provides rich measurement of discrimination claim outcomes, indicators of institutional grievance outlets in the workplace, and the measures of the presence or absence of other actors that arguably may alter the leverage exercised by the accused and the accuser.

 

The Data

The data to be used will be gathered from the Ohio Civil Rights Commission (OCRC), located in downtown Columbus, Ohio, by graduate student participants. The faculty coordinator, though contact with Keith McNeil (OCRC Director of Operations and Legal Director) and Michael Patten (OCRC Executive Director), has already been granted access to the archived, closed case files of the OCRC. Closed case files (i.e., cases that have been decided one way or another) are public information in the official sense, and thus do not require IRB Human Subjects approval. Sensitivity will nevertheless be exercised, and names of the accused and accuser will be removed.

             There are approximately 5,000 discrimination claims filed each year with OCRC, 90% of which are employment based and 10% of which are housing based. Since 1988, the base data for each case has been input into an excel spreadsheets by OCRC – spreadsheets that have already been provided by the OCRC for each year from 1988 to 2003, and that are currently being merged and converted into a singular SPSS data file. Base data include Case ID number, the charging party, the respondent (e.g., employer), the basis of the charge (e.g., race, gender, religion, etc.), the harm that was suffered, the job position held by the charging party, the position of the person committing the alleged harm, the final determination by OCRC, whether either party has legal or extra-organizational representation, employment history of charging party, whether there are comparative cases in the workplace, and a host of geographic identifiers for the workplace in question. Appendix A, Part I, and Appendix B, Part I, provide a preliminary overview of these measures for employment and housing discrimination cases, respectively.

             The resulting base data for each year from 1988 to 2003 equates to approximately 95, 000 cases. This large data set holds significant potential in its own right for rigorous statistical and comparative analyses of (1) spatial and institutional patterns of discrimination; (2) whether third party involvement effects the outcome of discrimination suits; and (3) the types of harm experienced within varying workplace contexts and among different groups. Moreover, and equally important, it includes important indicators that will help define relevant data for certain foci of the project (i.e., sexual harassment versus sanctions pertaining to pregnancy, or hiring discrimination versus discrimination in pay, promotion, or treatment of those in a current position), as well as OCRC’s final determination based on the evidence and action by the attorney general’s office. In this regard, it would be erroneous to assume that a discrimination claim necessarily implies that discrimination occurred. OCRC’s case determination will help distinguish cases with little supporting evidence from those with significant and supporting evidence in favor of the charging party’s claim.

             A random sample of cases (approximately 5,000-6,000) will be drawn and further data for these selected cases will be gathered from the archived case files themselves. This supplemental data, described briefly in Appendix A, Part II and Appendix B, Part II, entails written commentary from the charging party and respondent, as well from witnesses, pertaining to the event that prompted the discrimination claim. These statements will be photocopied, content coded, and the resulting data will be appended to the random sample’s base data, described previously. Access to these data are important in so much as they will allow for both quantitative and qualitative analyses of discrimination claims and counterclaims. Well-known and often cited work on racial discrimination (e.g., Feagin 1991) is based on interviews of those who suggest they have been discriminated against, but do not provide analyses of the rationales and counterclaims by alleged discriminators. Other work, in contrast, highlights the rationales of employers use when discriminating (e.g., Kirscheman and Neckerman 1991), but typically without denoting the consequences for, or alternative interpretations by, those on the receiving end of discriminatory acts. The practicum project being proposed, and the rich data it will afford, will be the first study of which I am aware to simultaneously analyze discrimination claims and counterclaims.

 

Multi-Level and Multi-Method Analyses

One of the most exciting features of the proposed project, beyond the theoretical and substantive questions that will be addressed and the obvious, practical utility of this research for informing political and workplace policy, is its multi-level and multi-method potential. The faculty coordinator plans to break graduate students into teams, depending on where their substantive interests lie in the project, and then have teams work together on data collection, defining the appropriate levels of analysis, and determining the most suitable methodology given the question(s) being asked.

             The richness of the data itself will allow for individual level, workplace-level, industry level, and spatial-geographic analyses. The character of the data makes it suitable for quantitative analysis of various sorts (depending on the dependent variable of interest), qualitative and text analysis in the case of analyzing discrimination claims and counterclaims, and comparative case analysis (i.e., QCA) for those interested in how a particular configurations of workplace or geographic attributes may lend themselves, more or less, to discrimination in employment or housing. Once defined in these regards, the teams will conduct analyses and write up preliminary results under the guidance and supervision of the faculty coordinator.