Performance of the Everyday Discrimination Scale: A Three Group Comparison

Discrimination has been found to impact health, but reliable measures of perceived discrimination are necessary to research how discrimination “gets under the skin”(1,2).  Among individuals belonging to multiple marginalized groups, single cause (e.g., racism or sexism) discrimination scales may be inadequate to assess discrimination experiences(3).  The Everyday Discrimination Scale (EDS) offers one possible solution to measuring discrimination across marginalized groups(1,4,5).  By assessing global experiences with everyday discrimination, this scale allows individuals within multiple minority groups to report discrimination without distinguishing inseparable causes of discrimination.  To understand how the scale assesses everyday discrimination experienced by individuals within different marginalized groups, a comparison of factor pattern loadings was performed using exploratory factor analyses with promax rotations on data from the Midlife Development in the United States survey (2004-2006).  People of color (N=340), sexual minorities (N=108), and substance-misusing individuals (N=46) were compared to evaluate scale performance.  Three factors were extracted for each group, but the factor pattern loadings differed between groups.  For example, two items (being treated with less respect and less courtesy) comprised a single factor among people of color and sexual minorities, but combined with other items among substance-misusing individuals.  One item (“people act afraid of me”) preformed differently within all three groups.  Results indicate that investigators wishing to measure multiple discriminations with EDS should use prior analyses to identify scale performance for specific populations to be surveyed.  Rather than summing across items to score EDS, weighted scoring might be used to adapt EDS to distinct populations.