When it comes to welcoming a stranger to a new church, are mainline churches, evangelicals, or Catholics more likely to discriminate based upon racial-sounding names? Prof. Bradley Wright — an associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut — reveals the findings from his field experiment designed to answer this question. The answers may surprise, and Brad provides some insight into why mainlines churches may differ from evangelicals when it comes to welcoming individuals who are different from them.
The first half of our interview is devoted to a methodological and ethical discussion of Prof. Wright’s innovative study. While this may sound a bit dry to some, understanding how academic studies that are reported in the news are conducted is very important, and both Brad and Tony spice up things with a bit of humorous banter. Brad lists the colleagues who helped in the study, their various roles, where the idea for the project came from (hint: his first book that we link to below), and how the study was set up. To uncover the possible prevalence of racial discrimination across different religious denominations, Brad and his team sent emails out to several thousand churches across the U.S. mentioning that the they were a person moving to the area and looking for a new congregation. The emails were randomly tagged with “racial sounding” names. Prof. Wright discusses how they came up with these names, and how the sample of congregations was generated. We also get into the ethics behind such a study. Brad describes the “internal review board” process and how the identities of participants were protected.
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