Improving the study of responses to experiences of ethnoracial exclusion—a heuristic for comparative qualitative research

ABSTRACT

This article advances the debate on responses to experiences of ethnoracial exclusion by proposing a heuristic for comparative qualitative research. The heuristic is developed based on an overview of the literature and of existing classifications of responses. It first introduces a differentiation between cognitive and practice-based responses to experiences of ethnoracial exclusion and, second, a differentiation between responses to incidents of racism and/or the general experience of racism on the one hand and strategies for gaining recognition in society on the other. The article also addresses challenges that occur when applying the heuristic in interview-based research (e.g. the trade-off between exploring interviewees’ meaning-making and accessing the whole spectrum of incidents experienced by the interviewees) and discusses the heuristic’s benefits: Most importantly, the heuristic enables comparisons between pre-existing findings in the field and provides a tool to guide qualitative comparative research.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-racism
• ethnoracial exclusion
• comparison
• discrimination
• destigmatization
• everyday resistance

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Drawing on an understanding of scholarly discourse on a given topic as a field in which scholars recognize each other and engage with each other’s work, I charted the field by, first, identifying leading figures and works in the debate on responses to ethnoracial exclusion (e.g., Lamont et al. 2016). In a second step, I reviewed all studies cited by those field-defining works as well as studies that have emerged since then and contribute to the field’s debate.

2 In their large interview study, Lamont et al. (2016) argued that self-identification (self-definition, but also national identification) is a dimension of groupness (together with group boundaries) and thus a factor explaining differences between different groups’ repertoires of responses. However, in the empirical sections of the book, the authors argue how racism shapes self-identification; they thus show that notions of belonging and self-identifications can be seen as responses to ethnoracial exclusion and not only as a factor explaining group differences (see Lamont et al. 2016, 135–138, 172; see also Moraes Silva 2016, 803–804).

3 Including this category in the case of, for instance, Lamont et al.’s (2016) study would have helped to make immediately clear why the overall number of reported incidents by Mizrahim is low and would have, even more importantly, shifted the focus away from the relative frequency of the various types of responses (Lamont et al. 2016, 29, Table 1.3), which does not do justice to how Mizrahim experience incidents of exclusion. As it stands, Mizrahim’s preferred response to incidents of exclusion is the same as African American’s preferred response: to confront. However, while African Americans appear to recognize racism when it occurs, Mizrahim tend to not use this frame in everyday life.

4 The ‘framing problem’ needs to also be considered in the recruitment process when telling interviewees what the interview will be about. Lamont et al. (2016, 291), for instance, initially postponed mentioning the salience of race for the project (see also Lamont et al. 2016, 326, Footnote 24).

5 Notably, those differences themselves can be a source of information and thus significant—especially when there are group-specific patterns in the different ways of narrating incidents.