Perceived discrimination and depressive symptoms among Muslims in the United States

ABSTRACT

Recent research documents extensive Islamophobia and discrimination against Muslims in the United States. The current study seeks to better understand the discrimination experienced by Muslims and its mental health consequences in comparison to that experienced within a general sample of Americans. Using data from an original national survey of 700 American adults and an oversample of 300 Muslims, our analyses indicate elevated levels of perceived discrimination among Muslims (both White and non-White), relative to White non-Muslims, and comparable to that experienced by non-Muslim racial/ethnic minorities. Furthermore, Muslims report higher rates of depressive symptoms than Christians and non-religious individuals, and this mental health disparity is fully explained by Muslims’ greater perceived discrimination. These findings suggest that the racialization of Muslims in the United States is a public health concern.

KEYWORDS:

• Perceived discrimination
• mental health
• islamophobia
• depression
• racialization
• Muslim Americans

Ethics statement

Approval for our survey involving research with human participants was granted on 22 October 2020 under Exempt Category 2 by the University of South Florida Institutional Review Board, application 001695.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Approval for research with human participants was granted by the University of South Florida Institutional Review Board, application 001695.

2 YouGov describes its sampling procedures as follows: “YouGov interviewed 1224 respondents who were then matched down to a sample of 1000 to produce the final dataset. The respondents were matched to a sampling frame on gender, age, race, and education. The frame was constructed by stratified sampling from the full 2018 American Community Survey (ACS) 1-year sample with selection within strata by weighted sampling with replacements (using the person weights on the public use file). The dataset contains n = 700 cases representing the US general population, and n = 300 Muslim Americans. The matched cases were weighted to the sampling frame using propensity scores. The matched cases and the frame were combined and a logistic regression was estimated for inclusion in the frame. The propensity score function included age, gender, race/ethnicity, years of education, and region. The propensity scores were grouped into deciles of the estimated propensity score in the frame and post-stratified according to these deciles. The weights were then post-stratified on 2016 Presidential vote choice, and a four-way stratification of gender, age (4-categories), race (4-categories), and education (4-categories), to produce the final weight” (YouGov 2020).

3 The self-identified immigration background of the Muslim oversample includes 32.9 per cent immigrant citizens and 11.6 per cent immigrant non-citizens. Repeating our analyses with the immigrant non-citizens excluded does not change the results. Bivariate analyses indicated that immigrant non-citizens did not differ from the other groups in levels of perceived discrimination. Therefore, to retain the sample size, we keep the non-citizens in the sample and use the phrase “Muslims in the United States,” rather than “Muslim Americans.”

4 We also constructed a perceived discrimination measure with out the item “security personnel singled you out for extra screening,” as this item may be particularly salient for Muslims (Selod 2018). The results using the 6-item perceived discrimination measure are identical to those using the 7-item measure.

5 Our sample contained few members of other religious faiths, with 11 Buddhist, 1 Hindu, and 18 Jewish respondents. We, therefore, excluded respondents reporting these faiths from our analyses.

6 78 respondents self-identified as non-White Hispanic and 5 respondents identified as Muslim and non-White Hispanic. Due to these small sample sizes, we grouped non-White Hispanic respondents in the “other” category. Analyses with a separate Hispanic category in the full sample indicated no difference in perceived discrimination from the “other” category (these are available upon request).

7 We also examined levels of depression within the subsample of Black respondents and found that Black Muslims reported significantly higher levels of depressive symptoms than Black non-Muslims (t = 2.4, p < .01).

Additional information

Funding

Data collection was supported by an internal award from the University of South Florida, Sarasota-Manatee campus.