 |
Questions? Call 888-624-8373 |
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
The following HTML text is provided to enhance online
readability. Many aspects of typography translate only awkwardly to HTML.
Please use the page image
as the authoritative form to ensure accuracy.
Page 21
4
Defining Housing Discrimination
The goal of the HDS is to measure the incidence of disparate
treatment discrimination by housing agents during their interaction
with borrowers who approach them as a result of a newspaper
advertisement. Adverse disparate treatment could result from racial
prejudice, financial incentives of the real estate agent, or other
factors. The goal of the study is not to determine the cause of
racial differences in treatment.
Stephen Fienberg commented that studies of discrimination in labor
markets (e.g., Heckman, 1998) address the notion of distinguishing
between market discrimination and the discrimination encountered by
a random person responding to a randomly selected advertisement.
The methodology in the labor market context is similar to that
employed in the HDS audit. Heckman's paper offers the following
definition of discrimination: “an otherwise identical person
is treated differently by virtue of that person's race or gender,
and race and gender by themselves have no direct effect on
productivity.” According to Heckman, discrimination is the
effect of race that arises from a ceteris paribus
hypothetical experiment in which race is allowed to vary while all
other aspects of the individual and circumstances are held
constant.
DISPARATE TREATMENT VERSUS DISPARATE
IMPACT
During the discussion of methodological implications of the
Phase II audit design, participants explored the differences
between disparate treat
|
|
|
|
|
Below are the first 10 and last 10 pages of uncorrected machine-read text (when available) of this chapter, followed by the top 30 algorithmically extracted key phrases from the chapter as a whole.
Intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text on the opening pages of each chapter.
Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.
Do not use for reproduction, copying, pasting, or reading; exclusively for search engines.
OCR for page 21
Page 21
4
Defining Housing Discrimination
The goal of the HDS is to measure the incidence of disparate
treatment discrimination by housing agents during their interaction
with borrowers who approach them as a result of a newspaper
advertisement. Adverse disparate treatment could result from racial
prejudice, financial incentives of the real estate agent, or other
factors. The goal of the study is not to determine the cause of
racial differences in treatment.
Stephen Fienberg commented that studies of discrimination in labor
markets (e.g., Heckman, 1998) address the notion of distinguishing
between market discrimination and the discrimination encountered by
a random person responding to a randomly selected advertisement.
The methodology in the labor market context is similar to that
employed in the HDS audit. Heckman's paper offers the following
definition of discrimination: “an otherwise identical person
is treated differently by virtue of that person's race or gender,
and race and gender by themselves have no direct effect on
productivity.” According to Heckman, discrimination is the
effect of race that arises from a ceteris paribus
hypothetical experiment in which race is allowed to vary while all
other aspects of the individual and circumstances are held
constant.
DISPARATE TREATMENT VERSUS DISPARATE
IMPACT
During the discussion of methodological implications of the
Phase II audit design, participants explored the differences
between disparate treat
OCR for page 22
Page 22
ment and disparate impact discrimination. Disparate treatment
discrimination is defined as negative treatment of minority candidates
due solely to the candidates' race. Disparate impact discrimination
occurs when a system is put in place that is not discriminatory in
intent, but negatively impacts a particular group of individuals. When
housing providers deny or make housing unavailable to persons on the
basis of characteristics not protected by the Fair Housing Act and
when these characteristics are correlated with race, the result is
disparate impact discrimination, not disparate treatment
discrimination.
Disparate impact would occur, for example, if a lending institution
did not finance older homes. In this case, the basis for denial would
not be one of the classes protected by fair housing laws, and the
policy would be universally applied. If racial minorities are much
more likely to live in older homes than whites, however, the policy
would exclude a higher proportion of racial minorities. Although
whites and minorities would be treated similarly, the policy
would adversely impact the protected group and thus constitute a form
of discrimination. The housing provider would have to demonstrate that
there was a business necessity for the policy and establish that there
was no less discriminatory alternative that could serve the same
business objective. Audit methodology is designed to measure only
disparate treatment discrimination.
During his presentation, Gregory Squires, Department of Sociology, The
George Washington University, suggested that, contrary to what some
believe, paired testing can potentially uncover the existence of
disparate impact discrimination in a given housing market. He asserted
that, based on information provided to the minority and white auditors
during the test, analysts can observe instances of disparate impact
not recorded as disparate treatment. For example, the housing provider
might share with the auditor information about the agency's policies
and practices that may differ for minority and white home seekers.
This information would not necessarily appear on the auditor's forms,
but would be part of the narrative the auditor provided to the
researchers. Though the policies highlighted would be applied to both
minority and white auditors, they could differentially impact minority
home seekers.
A related discussion addressed the ability to measure discrimination
statistically given the legal definition. Some individual and
household characteristics that are associated with disparate effects
have a disparate impact because their distributions vary with race. As
noted earlier, for enforcement audits, testing coordinators control
for other factors to isolate the
OCR for page 23
Page 23
effect of race on the treatment recorded. Participants questioned the
experimental approach used in enforcement audits and employed in the
HDS. While conceptually one can hold all factors but race constant,
doing so may not be possible in the actual housing market. In contrast
with an experiment where a patient is given a placebo or treatment,
one cannot assign or change an individual's racial identity. In the
absence of this ability to randomize, researchers typically use an
“approximate” study design that cannot be manipulated
experimentally.
Participants noted that the methodology used is dependent on the
research question of interest. Some participants expressed the
underlying question as: If African Americans were whites or whites
were African Americans, how would they be treated in the housing
market? This question suggests a baseline of no racial discrimination.
Other participants argued for a different framing of the question: In
the absence of racial discrimination, how would a minority or majority
home seeker be treated during the housing transaction?
GROSS AND NET ADVERSE TREATMENT
As discussed by Ross in his workshop remarks and his paper
“Paired Testing and the 2000 Housing Discrimination
Study” (see Appendix A), the HDS
data are used to generate two common alternative measures of
differential treatment. The first, gross adverse
treatment, measures the frequency of audits in which a white
auditor was treated favorably and a minority auditor was treated
unfavorably. The second measure of differential treatment, net
adverse treatment, measures the frequency with which the white
auditor was treated favorably, minus the frequency with which the
minority tester was treated favorably. Differential treatment could
result from discrimination by the housing agent or from legitimate,
not discriminatory factors. The gross measure will count legitimate
nondiscriminatory racial differences (e.g., the unit having
actually been rented between the visits of the white and minority
auditors) as instances of adverse treatment because researchers
cannot observe the intent of the housing agent. While these
instances will be counted in the net measure as well, the
presumption is that if differential treatment is not due to race
and the order of audit visits is randomized by race, rates of
adverse treatment for whites and minorities will cancel each other
out.
The gross measure of adverse treatment, then, overestimates
discrimination by including nondiscriminatory disparate treatment
resulting from
OCR for page 24
Page 24
random, unobserved differences in auditors. Conversely, the net
measure, although intended to capture differences in treatment that
result from racial discrimination, underestimates discrimination. The
hypothesis underlying the net measure is that the frequency with which
the minority auditor is treated adversely because of factors unrelated
to race can be proxied by the frequency with which the white auditor
is treated adversely. Underestimates of discrimination result because
instances in which the white auditor is treated less favorably are
netted out, even though these differences may be attributable to
unobserved adverse treatment of the minority auditor (Ondrich et al.,
2000). The use of gross and net measures is discussed in greater
detail in Chapter 5.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
disparate impact
Items in cart [0]
