The sensitive nature of the topic of race and racial discrimination has implications for how the discrimination variable should be assessed and the accuracy of reports of discrimination (Williams et al. 2003). Recent research on race-of-interviewer effects indicates that blacks are reluctant to reveal their true racial beliefs on race sensitive questions when talking to white interviewers. Instructively, Krysan and Couper (2003) found that the strongest effect of blacks being deferent to a white interviewer was for perceptions of racial discrimination (compared to attitudes on four other categories of race-related questions regarding racial and race-associated policies, black politics and the pace of civil rights). This pattern held both for in-person interviews and for self-administered interviews with a digital video of the interviewer. Irrespective of the race of the interviewer, making race salient in the assessment of discrimination can lead to response bias compared to the use of neutral terminology (Gomez and Trierweiler 2001). Many questions used to assess discrimination explicitly ask respondents to report on “racial discrimination” or experiences of discrimination “because of your race.” In contrast, the approach of
