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 Williams and his colleagues (Williams et al. 1997; Kessler et al. 1999) frames the questions about discrimination in terms of unfair treatment and asks about attribution only after a behaviorally descriptive experience, without emotionally charged language, has been endorsed. This approach seeks to address not only the problem of the sensitivity of questions regarding discrimination but also concerns about the problem of attributional ambiguity. Respondents are often uncertain of the reason (or attribution) for a specific interpersonal incident. Thus, building attribution into the question is likely to underestimate discriminatory encounters for which the attribution is uncertain (Williams et al. 2003). Asking questions about both racial and non-racial discrimination may capture more of the potential pathogenic phenomenon of perceived unfairness, and also reduce some of the measurement error that can occur if questions are asked only of racial discrimination. However, there is debate regarding optimal measurement approaches for perceived racial discrimination (Kressin et al. 2008), and limited empirical evidence on the
