Ethnic-Racial discrimination, identity, and out-group contact: A systematic review of daily process studies

Abstract

Objectives: Understanding how ethnicity and race shape individuals’ everyday experiences in context is critical for advancing scientific rigor and addressing ethnic-racial inequities. Daily process studies (e.g., Experience-Sampling Method, Ecological Momentary Assessment, daily diary methods) offer unique utility for studying ethnic-racial discrimination, ethnic-racial identity, and ethnic-racial outgroup contact. The goals of this systematic review were to (a) summarize novel contributions of research using daily process designs to understand these ethnic-racial-related processes in everyday life, and (b) inform avenues for future research directions using daily process approaches to understand everyday ethnic-racial experiences and their implications for health and well-being. Methods: We identified a total of 97 studies from 77 unique study samples that used daily process approaches to measure ethnic-racial discrimination (52 studies), ethnic-racial identity (33 studies), and ethnic-racial outgroup contact (22 studies). Results: Novel contributions of daily process studies include enhancing external validity by centering individuals’ everyday experiences as they go about typical life routines; using time-lagged approaches to test directionality of effects; and identifying within-person variability as a function of social context, individual differences, and time interval. Conclusions: Our recommendations for advancing integrative daily process studies of ethnic-racial experiences and identity are to include measures of multiple ethnic-racial-related constructs to understand their interrelations and interactions and broaden representation of study samples in this research (e.g., ethnic-racial backgrounds, developmental periods, regional contexts). Despite limitations (e.g., missing data), daily process approaches offer considerable promise for advancing research on the dynamics and consequences of ethnic-racial discrimination, identity, and outgroup contact in context.