Does the Everyday Discrimination Scale generate meaningful cross-group estimates? A psychometric evaluation.

Abstract

Studies linking discrimination to poor mental and physical health constitute one of the most robust branches of health inequities research. For more than two decades, and in more than a dozen countries, scholars working in this field have used the Everyday Discrimination Scale (EDS) to assess perceptions of discrimination. Two recent studies (Harnois et al., 2020; Harnois et al., 2019) cast doubt on the instrument's psychometric equivalence across diverse social groups, however. Our study builds on these previous analyses using a larger and more ethnically and geographically diverse sample of adults in the US, the Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiology Surveys. Multi-group Confirmatory Factor Analyses were carried out to compare the configural, metric, and scalar structures of the EDS. Analyzing perceptions of racial/ethnic discrimination, we find a lack of equivalence across race/ethnicity, consistent with previous research. Reports of general mistreatment are found to be equivalent across gender-based groups, but not across race/ethnicity, age- or education-based groups. Our study provides further evidence that the EDS should be used with caution, particularly when assessing general perceptions of discrimination, and particularly when making cross-group comparisons. Measurement invariance is required to effectively assess the relationship between discrimination and health; further refinement of the scale may be needed to achieve this goal.