Psychometrics of racism is an emerging field that aims to measure the incidence and impacts of racism on the psychological well-being of people of all races. At present, there are few instruments that attempt to capture the experience of racism in all of its complexity.

Self-reported inventories

The Schedule of Racist Events (SRE) is questionnaire for assessing frequency of racial discrimination in lives of African American

African American

African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...

s created in 1998 by Hope Landrine and Elizabeth A. Klonoff. SRE is an 18-item self-report inventory, assesses frequency of specific racist events in past year and in one's entire life, and measures to what extent this discrimination

Discrimination

Discrimination is the prejudicial treatment of an individual based on their membership in a certain group or category. It involves the actual behaviors towards groups such as excluding or restricting members of one group from opportunities that are available to another group. The term began to be...

 was stressful.

Other psychometric tools for assessing the impacts of racism include:

• The Racism Reaction Scale (RRS)
• Perceived Racism Scale (PRS)
• Index of Race-Related Stress (IRRS)
• Racism and Life Experience Scale-Brief Version (RaLES-B)
• Telephone-Administered Perceived Racism Scale (TPRS)

Physiological metrics

In a summary of recent research Jules P. Harrell, Sadiki Hall, and James Taliaferro describe how a growing body of research has explored the impact of encounters with racism or discrimination on physiological activity. Several of the studies suggest that higher blood pressure levels are associated with the tendency not to recall or report occurrences identified as racist and discriminatory. In other words, failing to recognize instances of racism is directly impacted by the blood pressure of the person experiencing the racist event. Investigators have reported that physiological arousal is associated with laboratory analogues of ethnic discrimination and mistreatment.

See also

• Stereotype threat
  Stereotype threat
  Stereotype threat is the experience of anxiety or concern in a situation where a person has the potential to confirm a negative stereotype about their social group. First described by social psychologist Claude Steele and his colleagues, stereotype threat has been shown to reduce the performance of...
  
  
• Race and health
  Race and health
  Race and health research, often done in the United States, has found both current and historical racial differences in the frequency, treatments, and availability of treatments for several diseases. This can add up to significant group differences in variables such as life expectancy...
  
  
• White guilt
  White guilt
  White guilt refers to the concept of individual or collective guilt often said to be felt by some white people for the racist treatment of people of color by whites both historically and presently...