Exploring cross-group discrimination: The subjective experience of inferiorizing events.

Abstract

This dissertation examined the theoretical and empirical implications of Adam's (1978) inferiorization construct for cross-group discrimination research, that is, research that attempts to identify similar themes and patterns across the reported experiences of historically stigmatized groups. The theory of inferiorization states that culturally stigmatizable characteristics are always associated with an interpersonal and institutional communication that one is somehow inferior to a dominant cultural group, cultural image, or community ideal. This dissertation had three goals: first, to show how the inferiorization construct applies to psychology's discrimination literature and delineate its theoretical properties; second, to describe an empirical study that demonstrates how inferiorization can be measured and used to investigate the experiences of social discrimination in college student samples of ethnic minorities, women, gay men and lesbians, and people with disabilities (total n = 263); and third, to relate these experiences to measures of self-perception to examine psychological correlates of inferiorizing experiences. Inferiorization is described as a function of the confluence of stigmatizable personal characteristics, a specific context, and associated cultural myths, an operational definition used to construct items for the Inferiorization Questionnaire. Findings of the empirical portion of this dissertation show that each group, in several contexts, reports the direct or indirect implication that their personal characteristics (that is, race, gender, sexual orientation, or disability) have disadvantageous meaning with respect to some important contextual or cultural ideal, demonstrating that a common aspect of intergroup discriminatory processes is the subjective experience of the inferiorization of salient differences. Consistent and unique relationships were found between an increase in the frequency of inferiorizing experiences and diminished self-perception. The inferiorization perspective is discussed as a theoretical framework that successfully incorporates and illuminates the shared and unique aspects of the various simultaneous reports of discrimination from stigmatizable social groups.