2018/12/01 by Geoffrey T. Wodtke
Medicine · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Confounding #Developmental psychology #Economics #Gender studies #General Social Survey #Individualism #Inequality #Intergenerational and Educational Inequality Studies #Medicine #Perspective (graphical) #Psychology #Race (biology) #Racial and Ethnic Identity Research #Set (abstract data type) #Sibling #Social inequality #Social psychology #Sociology #Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies #White (mutation)
paper · doi:10.1177/0190272518804145
crossref issued 2018/12/01 · crossref published 2018/12/01 · crossref published-print 2018/12/01 · openalex publication_date 2018/12/01 · crossref published-online 2018/12/07 · crossref created 2018/12/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref deposited 2026/05/01 · crossref indexed 2026/08/01 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
It is commonly hypothesized that education promotes more “enlightened” beliefs about racial inequality, and many prior studies document that white Americans with higher levels of education are more likely to agree with structural rather than individualist explanations for black disadvantages. Nevertheless, an alternative perspective contends that the ostensibly liberalizing effects of education are highly superficial, while yet another perspective cautions that any association observed between education and racial attitudes may be due to unobserved confounding. This study evaluates these perspectives by estimating the effects of education on beliefs about racial inequality from a set of cross-sectional, sibling, and panel models. Consistent with prior research, results from cross-sectional models fit to the General Social Survey (GSS) suggest that education promotes a genuine belief in structural over individualist explanations for racial inequality. However, results from sibling and individual fixed-effects models fit, respectively, to the 1994 Study of American Families and to the 2006–2010 GSS three-wave panels suggest that these effects may be superficial and are likely inflated by unobserved confounding.