Comments on Wetts and Willer 2018 "Privilege on the Precipice: Perceived Racial Status Threats Lead White Americans to Oppose Welfare Programs"
Social Forces published Wetts and Willer 2018 "Privilege on the Precipice: Perceived Racial Status Threats Lead White Americans to Oppose Welfare Programs", which indicated that:
Descriptive statistics suggest that whites' racial resentment rose beginning in 2008 and continued rising in 2012 (figure 2)...This pattern is consistent with our reasoning that 2008 marked the beginning of a period of increased racial status threat among white Americans that prompted greater resentment of minorities.
Wetts and Willer 2018 had analyzed data from the American National Election Studies, so I was curious about the extent to which the rise in Whites' racial resentment might be due to differences in survey mode, given evidence from the Abrajano and Alvarez 2019 study of ANES data that:
We find that respondents tend to underreport their racial animosity in interview-administered versus online surveys.
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I didn't find a way to reproduce the exact results from Wetts and Willer 2018 Supplementary Table 1 for the rise in Whites' racial resentment, but, like in that table, my analysis controlled for gender, age, education, employment status, marital status, class identification, income, and political ideology.
Using the ANES Time Series Cumulative Data File with weights for the full samples, my analysis detected p<0.05 evidence of a rise in Whites' mean racial resentment from 2008 to 2012, which matches Wetts and Willer 2018; this holds net of controls and without controls. But the p-values were around p=0.22 for the change from 2004 to 2008.
But using weights for the full samples compares respondents in 2004 and in 2008 who were only in the face-to-face mode, with respondents in 2012, some of whom were in the face-to-face mode and some of whom were in the internet mode.
Using weights only for the face-to-face mode, the p-value was not under p=0.25 for the change in Whites' mean racial resentment from 2004 to 2008 or from 2008 to 2012, net of controls and without controls. The point estimates for the 2008-to-2012 change were negative, indicating, if anything, a drop in Whites' mean racial resentment.
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NOTES
1. For what it's worth, the weighted analyses indicated that Whites' mean racial resentment wasn't higher in 2008, 2012, or 2016, relative to 2004, and there was evidence at p<0.05 that Whites' mean racial resentment was lower in 2016 than in 2004.
2. Abrajano and Alvarez 2019 discussing their Table 2 results for feeling thermometers ratings about groups indicated that (p. 263):
It is also worth noting that the magnitude of survey mode effects is greater than those of political ideology and gender, and nearly the same as partisanship.
I was a bit skeptical that the difference in ratings about groups such as Blacks and illegal immigrants would be larger by survey mode than by political ideology, so I checked Table 2.
The feeling thermometer that Abrajano and Alvarez 2019 discussed immediately before the sentence quoted above involved illegal immigrants; that analysis had coefficients of -2.610 for internet survey mode, but coefficients of 6.613 for Liberal, -1.709 for Conservative, 6.405 for Democrat, and -8.247 for Republican. So the liberal/conservative difference is 8.322 and the Democrat/Republican difference is 14.652, compared to the survey mode difference is -2.610.
3. Dataset: American National Election Studies. 2021. ANES Time Series Cumulative Data File [dataset and documentation]. November 18, 2021 version. www.electionstudies.org
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