How do Social and Economic Ideology Affect Reactions to Racial Equity and Social Justice Language Among Leaders?
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Key Findings
- Neutral language is generally preferred over racial equity language across the ideological spectrum. In addition, our findings suggest potential ideological bias in the racial equity language.
- Reaction to social justice language with no mention of race does not differ by ideology and is similarly accepted.
- Further research is needed to see whether these findings can be replicated with a broader range of racial equity and social justice language tests than those explored in the current study.
To better understand the perspectives of influential people, we fielded the What Shapes Health and Well-Being survey to a nationally representative sample of state and local leaders drawn from multiple sectors. We fielded the survey in two phases—October 2020 through May 2021 and September 2021 through March 2022.
During data collection we became concerned about potential bias because of variation in response rates across sectors, how few conservatives responded to the survey, and concerns expressed by a few sample members who refused to participate in the survey. Those sample members described strong negative reactions to the perceived bias of the survey language.
To further understand the impact of survey language, we conducted two follow-up research activities in 2023—a leaders panel survey experiment to see if the pattern of reactions to racial equity language among leaders was similar to what we found for the general population test we conducted in 2022, and a qualitative study with leaders to better understand their reaction.
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How Do Social and Economic Ideology Affect Reactions to Racial Equity Language?
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