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Emerging Frontiers in Audit Study Research: Mechanisms, Variation, and Representativeness

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Audit Studies: Behind the Scenes with Theory, Method, and Nuance

Part of the book series: Methodos Series ((METH,volume 14))

Abstract

Audit studies have gained popularity in the social sciences, producing important insights about discrimination and bias across a range of social statuses, such as race and gender. Yet, important questions persist about why, when, and where discrimination and bias emerge. In this chapter, I suggest that tackling these issues is a central task of audit studies and discuss emerging frontiers of audit study research that are attempting to address these pressing issues. First, audit studies can contribute to our understanding of why discrimination occurs by incorporating strategies to uncover the mechanisms that drive the empirical patterns observed in the data. Second, audit studies can provide insights about when and where discrimination and bias occur by paying attention to theoretically important variation in average treatment effects and clarifying the representativeness of a given set of findings. Throughout, I present evidence from recent audit study research that pushes the boundaries on each of these frontiers and discuss potential paths forward to continue to advance the design, implementation, and contribution of this method to social science research.

I thank Maria Abascal, Jacob Avery, Mike Bader, Alex Murphy, S. Michael Gaddis, and an anonymous reviewer for comments on an earlier version of this chapter. The usual disclaimer applies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Audit studies need not only examine treatment in markets. For example, Milkman et al. (2012) use an audit study to examine faculty members’ responses to prospective doctoral students that varied in their race, ethnicity, and gender.

  2. 2.

    This can be done via electronic or paper applications as well as with in-person actors. This distinction will be discussed in more detail, below.

  3. 3.

    When I refer to mechanisms in this context, I am referring to the theoretical construct or constructs that connect an independent and dependent variable with one another.

  4. 4.

    A distinct, but related, strategy is to contact the employers that were targeted in an audit study and collect information about their attitudes or beliefs. Indeed, utilizing this approach, Rooth (2010) finds that employers’ scores on the Implicit Association Test (IAT) are correlated with the treatment of Arab-Muslim job applicants in the Swedish labor market.

  5. 5.

    Rivera and Tilcsik (2016) also conducted a survey experiment and found that similar mechanisms were at play in the survey experiment and the interviews.

  6. 6.

    Additional creative strategies are also possible for researchers trying to diversify the ways in which they find job openings. In addition to utilizing newspaper advertisements, for example, Lahey (2008) cold-called employers in the two cities where she conducted her audit study to identify job openings.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    David S. Pedulla

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Correspondence to David S. Pedulla .

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of California – Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, USA

    S. Michael Gaddis

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Pedulla, D.S. (2018). Emerging Frontiers in Audit Study Research: Mechanisms, Variation, and Representativeness. In: Gaddis, S. (eds) Audit Studies: Behind the Scenes with Theory, Method, and Nuance. Methodos Series, vol 14. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71153-9_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71153-9_9

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