Age Disparities in Frequency of Everyday Discrimination and Heightened Vigilance in a National United States Sample
Roger Wong, Karen Gonzalez, Kiersten Crawford

TL;DR
Younger adults in the U.S. experience more everyday discrimination and vigilance compared to older adults, according to a national survey.
Contribution
This study provides new evidence on how experiences of discrimination and vigilance decrease with age in a nationally representative U.S. sample.
Findings
Young adults reported the highest levels of discrimination and vigilance, which decreased with age.
Older adults had 48% lower discrimination and 39% lower vigilance compared to young adults after adjusting for covariates.
Age-related differences in discrimination and vigilance were statistically significant across all age groups.
Abstract
Discrimination and vigilance are known to be crucial psychological factors that influence how individuals interact with others in their environment, however, whether these experiences vary across the lifespan remains poorly understood. Our present study compared age differences in the frequency of discrimination and vigilance. The 2023 National Health Interview Survey administered the validated five-item Everyday Discrimination Scale (e.g. treated with disrespect) and four-item Heightened Vigilance Scale (e.g. careful about your appearance) among a nationally representative sample of 28,583 adults in the United States. We categorized respondents into four age groups: young adult (18-24 years), early middle-age (25-39 years), late middle-age (40-64 years), and older adult (65+ years). Composite scores were created separately for discrimination (range 0-20) and vigilance (range 0-16) by…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsEvolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior · Social and Intergroup Psychology · Racial and Ethnic Identity Research
