Annotated Bibliography on Pro-Affirmative Action
1st article: (Pro-Affirmative Action)
Parker, C. P., Baltes, B. B., & Christiansen, N. D. (1997). Support for affirmative action, justice
perceptions, and work attitudes: A study of gender and racial-ethnic group differences.
Journal of Applied Psychology, 82(3), 376-389.
Research Question: Does race/ethnicity and gender affect affirmative action at the workplace and how does it affect the perceptions/reactions from those workers?
Hypothesis 1: White male workers’ perceptions that their institution supports AA/EO are predicted to be higher than White women, Asians, and Blacks/Hispanics.
Hypothesis 2: The perceived organizational support for AA/EO will be negatively related to perceptions of organizational justice and career development opportunities for White men and will be positively related to women and racial–ethnic minority group members and will be even greater for Blacks/Hispanics and Asians.
Hypothesis 3: The perceptions of organizational support for AA/EO will be negatively related to satisfaction and loyalty for White men and will be positively related for women and minority group members and will be even stronger for Blacks/Hispanics and Asians.
Methods: This empirical correlational study compared relationships between the perceptions of 4 groups of federal employees, which include 4,919 White men, 1,622 White women, 492 Blacks/Hispanics, and 195 Asians ranging from ages 18-75 in the US who were employed in a variety of jobs: scientist, engineer, professional administrative, clerical, and technician. They were questioned to see what their support was for AA/EO, distributive and procedural justice, career development opportunities, and work attitudes. Data was collected from an organization-wide climate survey. This was conducted by mailing questionnaires to all permanent employees. Their responses were collected by a third-party consultant to ensure confidentiality. They combined the Black and Hispanic groups to boost their statistical results and kept White women and Asians separate due to previous outcomes of similar studies. The responses of the survey were scaled from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Some control variables were age, education, level in the organizational hierarchy, and tenure. Age was scaled from 18-75, education levels ranged from high school to doctorate. The level in the organizational hierarchy was based on their pay grade, which ranged from entry-level to professional-level. The tenure ranged from less than 1 year to 42 years. A method they used was mean and covariance structure analyses (MACS), which is a two-step process. The first step investigated whether the measurements of the six constructs and the effects of the control variables were proportionate for all four groups. The second step was implementing an omnibus test for differences between the groups and further recorded group means and construct relationships. The independent variable in this study is the race and gender of the workers. The dependent variable is the perceptions of the workers that their organization supports AA/EO.
Results: Group membership mediated the mean levels of perceived organizational support for AA/EO, which supports Hypothesis 1. Women and racial/ethnic minority group members perceived less support for AA/EO in the organization than did White men, which was already predicted. White men had the highest levels of perceived support for AA/EO, while, Blacks/Hispanics had the lowest levels of perceived support for AA/EO. These results show that the mean levels of procedural justice, distributive justice, and perceptions of career development opportunities were not acceptably different across the four groups of workers. White women had the highest overall satisfaction for loyalty while White Men, Blacks/Hispanics and Asians reported lower levels of loyalty. Asians had the lowest overall rating of satisfaction. In support of Hypothesis 2, the relationships between perceived support for AA/EO, justice perceptions, and career development opportunities were in fact, mediated by group membership. Although, the prediction was negative for White Males, the perceived support for AA/EO was positively correlated to perceptions of organizational justice and increased career development opportunities across all four groups. The relationships were stronger for women and racial/ethnic minorities than for White men which was predicted by the investigators. Also, Blacks/Hispanics were more likely to perceive support for AA/EO as related to fair outcomes, processes, and increased career development opportunities. The Asian sample groups relationships were very similar to the White Women’s sample, which wasn’t as predicted. The perceived support for AA/EO was positively related to work attitudes for White men. This doesn’t support Hypothesis 3. White men and White women had similar perceptions of support for AA/EO, which were correlated to increased loyalty but not overall satisfaction. There were large differences between White men and White women which provides some support for Hypothesis 3, however, the perceptions of support for AA/EO were stronger for Blacks/Hispanics than for the other groups for satisfaction and loyalty in the workplace. The Asian employees’ sample of perceptions of support for AA/EO weren’t accurately correlated to work attitudes.
Implications: The data above mainly supports Hypotheses 1 and 2 and partially supports Hypothesis 3. The article supports affirmative action by showing that the people who the policymakers are intending to help (women and ethnic minorities) are in support of the policy. Therefore, if there is support among the people who are supposed to be benefitting from the policy, it shows that affirmative action is being viewed as positive within the community and not something that would put people at an unfair disadvantage. There was a moderately low sample size for the Asian employees, which could be why the results were different across groups or could mean the results aren’t reliably accurate. It is also worth noting that there may have been bias because it was a survey, which can cause individuals to lie or act differently than they would have in person or can cause them to put certain answers because that’s what they thought the investigators would want to receive. For future research, researchers could use these results and try to create a more appropriate and efficient way of investigating and can use these results to compare with their own.
Article 2: (Pro-Affirmative Action)
Davis, C. E., & West, J. P. (1984). Implementing Public Programs: Equal Employment
Opportunity, Affirmative Action, and Administrative Policy Options. Review of Public
Personnel Administration, 4(3).
Research question: Do the Sunbelt cities and Frostbelt cities in the United States have an adopted merit system based on their ability to perform or an approved affirmative action/plan and are they in support of EEO or AA?
Hypothesis 1: Personnel managers already have a predisposed positive attitude towards AA and would be less accepting towards EEO.
Hypothesis 2: Personnel managers working in larger cities are predicted to show greater support for AA policies and administrators that are working in the Frostbelt cities would have a favorable attitude for AA as compared to administrators working in Sunbelt cities which have a negative attitude, due to the communities in which they work, which have higher number of minorities and are more receptive to minority hiring.
Hypothesis 3: The adoption of a merit system would increase support for EEO and lessen support for AA.
Hypothesis 4: An Affirmative Action policy would be more favored by individuals if minority applicants are rated approximately the same on selection criteria, more spending for on-the-job training to prepare minorities for promotions, special efforts to advertise job vacancies in minority communities, and use of numerical representativeness were the basis of selection for ranking methods determined by civil service examinations.
Methods: The researchers conducted a correlational study and sent out 800 questionnaires via a mail survey of public personnel administrators. Only 403 of the people who received the questionnaires were usable responses. Public sector work experience is a controlled variable – the people that responded mainly worked in small cities, some worked in medium-sized cities , and even fewer in large-cities. Respondents came from all regions of the USA, the majority were from Frostbelt cities and the rest were from Sunbelt cities. The majority of the respondents were white males. Some control variables were age and education. The education level ranged from high school training to postgraduate training. The ages ranged from below 34 to above 45. The questionnaire asked whether the city that was employing the respondent had adopted a merit system or had approved an affirmative action/plan. If the respondents answered “Yes,” then they were further asked the approval date of the policy. The independent variable is whether the respondent was from a Sunbelt or Frostbelt city, their age, and other differences among individual respondents. The dependent variable is whether they are in support of EEO or AA and whether their workplace has adopted a merit system based on ability to perform or an approved affirmative action/plan.
Results: Overall, 7 out of 10 cities have merit systems, while 8 of 10 have adopted an affirmative action program. One of the findings is that the personnel managers already favor the equality of process and would be less passionate toward the evaluation of equal opportunity. The majority of the respondents are “high supporters” for EEO and only a few are in the “low support” category. On the other hand, the respondents for the support of Affirmative Action index are higher for the “low supporters” and low for the “high supporters” which shows that there is low approval by urban personnel managers. There is partial support for Hypotheses 1, 2, and 3. It was shown that it is too hard to generalize individual attitudes within the Frostbelt-Sunbelt cities, however personnel manager’s attitudes towards EEO and AA do vary according to the size of the cities that they work in which partially supports Hypothesis 1 and supports Hypothesis 2. As expected, personnel manager respondents from larger cities were significantly more likely to support AA than the respondents residing in smaller cities. The researchers found that the application of a merit system did not seem to have an impact on attitudes favoring EEO and disliking AA which doesn’t support Hypothesis 3. However, the research does show that having an AA program implemented does significantly affect the distribution of attitudes. Those respondents that reside in cities without such programs had positive attitudes towards EEO while stating lower support for AA. The personnel administrator’s environmental characteristics and personal background had little or no effect on attitudes of equity. In support of Hypothesis 4, there was a favorable attitude toward AA and it was considerably connected to all four options. On the other hand, EEO supporters were less persuaded to favor such options than non-supporters, suggesting that there is a need to have worthy criteria.
Implications: The data above partially supports all three Hypotheses. The article supports affirmative action by showing that people from larger cities with a more diverse population would show higher levels of support of AA. It also showed that if there was already an AA policy in place in the workplace, then there were higher levels of support for AA. This shows that people who are surrounded by diverse cultures and are already familiar with an AA policy will agree with and support AA. Therefore, this shows that women and ethnic minorities will have more support if the workplace that they are in has employees that are comfortable with and support AA. There was a low representation of minorities and women within the sample of respondents and there was too large of a majority of white male respondents. This gives a large bias view for white males within this investigation. There was also too large of a focus on whether the respondents had complaints individually rather than the overall workplace’s view as a whole. There is a large role of state and local governments and a low federal presence that is reflected in this investigation about how to combat discriminatory employment practices. The sample sizes could’ve been larger and the survey didn’t ask specifically which state the respondent worked in, which could have an influence of EEO and AA views. The future research that this study could influence would be if another investigator would conduct a similar study and if they used a similar demographic of people that live in the Sunbelt-Frostbelt regions. I don’t believe that the research gathered in this study is too helpful for future research studies because of the biased view and low representation of minorities and women.
Article 3: (Pro-Affirmative Action)
Phelan, J. E., & Rudman, L. A. (2011). System Justification Beliefs, Affirmative
Action, and Resistance to Equal Opportunity Organizations. Social Cognition,29(3),
376-390.
Research Question: Do unenthusiastic attitudes toward affirmative action policies and the organizations that are devoted to them originate from legitimizing beliefs that reject the presence of discrimination in modern society?
Hypothesis 1: People who view society as moral and that equal-opportunity has been accomplished, will result in negative attitudes towards affirmative action policies and institutes that support them.
Hypothesis 2: If system justification encourages resistance to equal opportunity, feelings toward affirmative policies will result in the correlation between system-justifying beliefs and disapproval to corporations which favor affirmative action. System justification can be defined as the human tendency to view the status quo of society as fair and just, partly because of the need to perceive the world as place that already naturally fosters equality.
Methods: The researchers administered a correlational study to measure attitudes of respondents. To measure attitudes toward equal opportunity organizations the researchers used an Implicit Association Test. The IAT evaluates individuals by using reaction-time related tasks that implicitly shows how individuals gauge social objects. The tasks involve categorizing items into groups by clicking specific computer buttons as items emerge on the screen. The items can be positive or negative words and will be associated with certain objects. The response time of the individual categorizing certain words with certain objects is recorded. There were also questions that the researchers asked the participants that revealed their explicit attitudes towards the company and their attitudes on affirmative action which was rated based on a scale. Also, to study whether system justification causes resistance to equal opportunity organizations, the researchers assembled several job advertisements for 6 local start-up companies that were currently searching for employees and were based on their descriptions, which included genuine affirmative action statements. These companies offered a variety of services which signified that they were hiring various positions. Participants also accomplished the IAT test and reported their beliefs on each of the companies and their attitudes towards policies on affirmative action. There were a total of 297 participants and they were mainly white males and only a few percent were non-white. The order in which the six companies were presented were different across participants. The independent variable in this study would be the individual’s system justification beliefs. The dependent variable would be their attitudes towards affirmative action and whether they support corporations which favor affirmative action.
Results: The research shows that the participants overall displayed more positive attitudes toward the affirmative action companies than the merit-based companies. Mainly, Non-White participants showed drastically more positive attitudes toward the affirmative action companies and had lower levels of system justification than White participants. Female participants had higher overall attitudes toward the affirmative action companies and lower levels of system justification than did men. The majority of the participants were white males so the main outcome of this study is that if the participant has higher system justification beliefs than their attitude towards equal opportunity companies which will result in the refusal of affirmative action policies.
Implications: The data above supports Hypotheses 1 and 2 by showing that people who view society as moral and that equal-opportunity has been accomplished will have a negative attitude towards affirmative action policies and the institutes that support them because the majority of the respondents had higher system justification beliefs which caused them to view affirmative action as unecessary and negative. This study supports affirmative action by showing that people who already view society as equal don’t believe that AA is necessary because they don't think that there is problem that needs to be solved, arguably due to their experiencing of privileges that being white has afforded them. This points to the fundamental lack of information among opposers of AA because they aren't looking at the situation from another’s perspective, perhaps due to the fact that they might not witness or experience discrimination on a regular basis. These were only correlational for white males. This shows that system justification lessens interest for equal opportunity organizations by encouraging opposition to social practices intended to reduce group in-differences. The beginning of these negative attitudes start with a pre-disposed negative attitude towards affirmative action. People who exhibit high levels of system justification are bias against affirmative action because they don't believe that there is a problem that needs to be solved. On the other hand females and minorities had overall positive attitudes towards affirmative action a believe it to be beneficial because they had lower levels of system justification. This study’s results are all correlational which makes it difficult to support the hypothesis to its full extent. For future research that uses system justification to observe its impact on opposition to equal opportunity programs and companies would be beneficial but wouldn't help prove any new information than what they predicted.
Article 4: (Pro-Affirmative Action)
Tam, M. Y., & Bassett, G. W. (2004). Does Diversity Matter? Measuring the Impact of High
School Diversity on Freshman GPA. Policy Studies Journal,32(1), 129-143.
Research Question: How does the diversity of a student’s high school affect their performance in college?
Hypothesis: Students that come from high schools that have more ethnically and gender-based diversity will achieve higher GPAs in their first year of college.
Methods: The researchers constructed a correlation study by sampling 1,661 freshman at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) who attended Illinois public high schools and assessing the diversity of these high schools based on two measures: The Absolute Diversity Index (AbD) and Relative Diversity Measures. The Absolute Diversity Index (AbD) is the likelihood that two students from a specific high school chosen randomly will be of different ethnic heritage. The researchers broke down the ethnic backgrounds into 4 separate categories (Asian, African American, Caucasian, and Latino) and evaluated the percentage of students within each category. The Relative Diversity Measure (RelD) represents how diverse a specific high school is in comparison to UIC. The ethnic proportions of the high schools and the University were compared group-by-group in order to determine the number. The independent variables are the two diversity measures mentioned above (AbD and RelD) as they pertain to the each student’s specific high school. The dependent variable is the student's GPA the first year of college. When assessing the effect of diversity on performance, the researchers controlled for variables that might affect or be correlated with GPA, including students’ ACT scores, class rank, racial ethnic background, gender, whether their school is in Chicago, and whether the high school was considered of high quality.
Results: The results of The Absolute Diversity Index (AbD) concluded that a student that came from a more diverse high school would be expected to perform better and obtain an overall higher GPA than a student who came from from a least diverse high school. The high schools that had a higher AbD rating tended to produce students that achieved higher GPAs, especially in students who performed at the bottom of their high school GPA distribution.
Results of the other diversity measure, RelD, student that came from a high school as diverse as UIC would be expected to perform better and obtain an overall higher GPA than a student who came from from an all-White or all-Black high school. As with the AbD, the RelD impacts are greater for students at the bottom of the GPA distribution. The gender of the students significantly affected whether or not the diversity of their high school impacted their freshman academic performance in college. Male students experienced little to no diversity impact, whereas a female student from a diverse high school was expected to get a significantly higher GPA than a female student from an all-White or all-Black high school.
Implications: The data above supports the Hypothesis by showing that students who came from a more diverse high school obtained higher GPAs in the first year of college than students who came from less diverse high schools, such as all-White or all-Black. One of the limitations of the study is that it was primarily focused on the academic benefits of a diverse student body in high school rather than a diverse college student body. In fact, they only focused on one college – they didn't compare the effects of diversity in the college classroom on success post-graduation. However, the reason that this supports affirmative action is because it proves that being surrounded by more diverse backgrounds enhances the learning environment in high school, so one can assume that this positive effect of diversity would extend to the college academic experience as well.
Article 5: (Anti-Affirmative Action)
Sidanius, J., Pratto, F., & Bobo, L. (1996). Racism, conservatism, affirmative action, and
intellectual sophistication: A matter of principled conservatism or group dominance?
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(3), 476-490.
Research Question : How does one’s level of educational sophistication affect the relationship between their support for affirmative action and their political conservatism? In other words, to what extent can a person’s opposition to affirmative action be explained by a principled conservative political ideology (as opposed to being explained by racist tendencies or being oriented towards social dominance)?
Hypothesis: The researchers expected the relationship between political conservatism and anti-affirmative action to increase in strength as educational sophistication increased. In other words, the more educationally sophisticated someone is, the more likely their reason for holding an anti-affirmative action stance is due to their political conservatism (as opposed to something like racism).
Method: The researchers conducted correlational study by administering a questionnaire to 5,655 randomly selected students from the University of Texas at Austin. Only students of European descent were studied. In total, 3,861 students provided feedback relating to the variables that were being measured. The researchers measured students based on educational level, political conservatism, affirmative action attitude, and classical racism. Educational level was based on the student’s year at the university (freshman, sophomore, junior, senior, or graduate student). Political conservatism was measured by having participants rank their political beliefs on a 5-point scale from very liberal to very conservative and everything in between. Affirmative action attitude was determined by questioning the participant on their current attitudes on AA based on a 5-point scale, ranging from very positive to very negative. Classical racism was gauged by different racial attitudes based on a 5-point scale from very positive to very negative. The independent variable is education sophistication. The dependent variable is the strength of the relationship between political conservatism and anti-affirmative action beliefs.
Results: First, as expected, political conservatism was positively correlated with anti-affirmative action attitudes, regardless of educational sophistication. Secondly, the strength of the relationship between anti-affirmative action attitudes and political conservatism increased as intellectual sophistication and class standing (freshman, senior, graduate student, etc.) increased. The researchers concluded that anti-affirmative action attitudes of conservatives and cannot be explained wholly by racism, especially at higher levels of education.
Implications: The researchers found evidence supporting the Hypothesis as stated above: as educational sophistication increased, so did the strength of the relationship between participants’ political conservatism and opposition to affirmative action. While the point of the study wasn’t to assess whether affirmative action is effective as a hiring and/or admission policy, it demonstrated that the people who oppose affirmative action are not doing so because they're racist but rather because AA is at odds with their politically conservative ideology. In other words, they are maintaining their political integrity by opposing affirmative action – it simply does not reconcile with the traditional conservative viewpoint. While this finding does not directly support the argument against affirmative action’s merits, it at least shows that someone can have views that oppose AA that don’t necessarily stem from racism or any other form of ill will. Therefore, it supports the case that opposers of AA should be given credence and not immediately dismissed as immoral racists.
Article 6: (Anti-Affirmative Action)
Pojman, L. P. (1998). The case against affirmative action. International Journal of Applied
Philosophy, 12(1), 97-115.
Research Question: Under what circumstances do college students think it is proper to classify people based on group membership? How do their responses differ according to 1) what type of group the classification is based on as well as 2) what the purpose of the categorization is?
To investigate the general attitudes toward the use of social category information, the differences in these attitudes based on the type of social category used, the differences based on the use to which the category information is put, the interaction between the type of social category and the use to which the information is put, the differences in attitudes based on subjects’ own group membership, and the personality correlates of positive or negative attitudes toward social categorization.
Hypothesis 1: It is expected that people who lean conservative politically, and people who believe the world is a fair place will find the identification of social categories less appropriate.
Hypothesis 2: There will be some level of negative sentiment regarding social categorization in general – however, this might be affected by the positive benefits that are associated with categorization, which will inevitably be mentioned in the responses of some participants.
Method: The researchers constituted a correlational study by questioning seventy-one undergraduates (29 men, 41 women and 1 unspecified gender) from a small college in the midwest with a homogeneous population and a roughly moderate orientation on the political spectrum.
One independent variable was whether the participant was being ask if social categorization was appropriate based on race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or college major. Another independent variable is what the participants were told was the purpose for the social categorization. Whereas the first variable was likely to elicit strong emotional reactions in participants, this variable was expected to have little to no strong emotional associations, and it was therefore included to evaluate their general feelings about using categories in identifying people. Some were told the purpose of the categorization was to simply identify individuals (identification), others that is was to form a campus social group for students with similar backgrounds (social group), others that it was used to form a campus political group (political group), and others that it was used as parts of college admissions criteria for purposes of promoting on-campus diversity (affirmative action purposes).
The dependent variables of the study were 1) how the subjects felt on the appropriateness of categorizing, 2) whether the subject would want others to identify them by this specific category (for any of the purposes mentioned in the second set of independent variables above), and 3) whether or not the subject would want to have this information about another person (for any of the aforementioned purposes). These responses were rated on a 7-point scale – 7 indicating the most extreme position against the act of categorizing. Respondents were also asked to describe any shortcomings they saw when it comes to using each specific category.
Results: The researchers found that the main finding of the study was that subjects had mostly negative ratings. Religion, sexual orientation, and race had the most opposition when asking subjects. However, when using religion in the use to which the category was being put, it received comparable ratings, while in the identification and social group conditions, sexual orientation got low rating of opposition, and in the political group or affirmative-action conditions, sexual orientation received greater ratings of opposition. The Gender and College major categories had the least amount of objections, except when it was used to form a social group, which caused gender to receive the same rating as sexual orientation. Although Gender and College major had low objections, when the category use was not specified (the identification condition), it tended to have the fewest amount of objections, while political group condition had the greatest amount of objections to categorization. Respondents were relatively fine with categorizing for affirmative action purposes when the categories used were gender and college major. They did not support affirmative action when it came to using sexual orientation and religion, while support for using race for affirmative action purposes was medium. Also, people who lean towards a more conservative political stance tended to show a larger belief in a just world and also had low objection rating for race, religion, and sexual orientation categories when used as membership labels.
Implications: The data above supports Hypotheses 1 and 2. There was generally negative ratings and that people who lean more conservatively believed that social categorization would be less appropriate was found to be true. People don't want religion, sexual orientation, and race in regards to affirmative action because it receive the highest overall opposition ratings. Therefore, the study reveals that individuals don't believe in classifying people by groups, which is what affirmative action does. This shows that the people within the study do not want to be identified by race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or college major, perhaps because they think that it is unfair to focus on one aspect of who someone is and could even be considered as reverse discrimination in some cases. A limitation in this study is that the majority of the subjects were white which makes it harder to compare groups and makes it so that the findings of the study cannot be generalized to how society feels on categorizing.