Prejudice is an adverse judgment without knowing the relevant facts or formation of an opinion beforehand without good justification.
Sociologists do have tools to facilitate them in measuring prejudice. The common form is conducting surveys with open-ended questions, like that in Likert Scale surveys. The Bogardus Scale, although an old measurement tool, is still used for prejudice measurement against a certain group of people.
Another, tool is the Harvard’s Implicit Association Test (IAT). Some contemporary measurement tools are also used in addition to the writing instruments, these days.
The tools like MRIs; brain scans and other bio-diagonstic tools are considered accurate as compared to written tools, where a person might refrain from sharing the right information or maybe is indulgent in self-deception.
Likert is a psychometric scale, commonly used in questionnaires, that has different level of agreements, against each question, for those who are filling in the questionnaire. This is a widely used scale in survey research.
The Bogardus Social Distance Scale empirically measures people’s willingness to participate in social contacts of varying degrees of closeness with the members of diverse social groups. These groups can be other races, ethnic groups, homosexuals etc.
The Implicit Association Test is however an experimental measure within social psychology. It is designed to detect the strength of a person’s automatic association between representations of concepts in his memory. The test requires rapid categorization of the target concepts with an attribute. The pairing are later studied and interpreted. The faster pairings are stronger, whereas, the slower pairing are weaker concepts. These results measure an individual’s implicit attitudes, many times even without his awareness.
Sociologists do have tools to facilitate them in measuring prejudice. The common form is conducting surveys with open-ended questions, like that in Likert Scale surveys. The Bogardus Scale, although an old measurement tool, is still used for prejudice measurement against a certain group of people.
Another, tool is the Harvard’s Implicit Association Test (IAT). Some contemporary measurement tools are also used in addition to the writing instruments, these days.
The tools like MRIs; brain scans and other bio-diagonstic tools are considered accurate as compared to written tools, where a person might refrain from sharing the right information or maybe is indulgent in self-deception.
Likert is a psychometric scale, commonly used in questionnaires, that has different level of agreements, against each question, for those who are filling in the questionnaire. This is a widely used scale in survey research.
The Bogardus Social Distance Scale empirically measures people’s willingness to participate in social contacts of varying degrees of closeness with the members of diverse social groups. These groups can be other races, ethnic groups, homosexuals etc.
The Implicit Association Test is however an experimental measure within social psychology. It is designed to detect the strength of a person’s automatic association between representations of concepts in his memory. The test requires rapid categorization of the target concepts with an attribute. The pairing are later studied and interpreted. The faster pairings are stronger, whereas, the slower pairing are weaker concepts. These results measure an individual’s implicit attitudes, many times even without his awareness.
