Cross-Validation of the Schedule of Racist Events

Abstract

This article presents a cross-validation study of the Schedule of Racist Events (SRE), a brief inventory that assesses the frequency of various types of racist dis-crimination in Blacks’lives. A new, larger, more representative sample of 520 Af-rican Americans residing in 10 randomly-selected southern California census tracts completed the SRE and a measure of psychiatric symptoms. Results re-vealed that 96% of Blacks reported experiencing some type of racist discrimina-tion in the past year, 98% reported experiencing racism at some point in their lives, and 95% found racism to be stressful. Factor analyses revealed that all items in the SRE subscales load on a single factor, and reliability and validity co-efficients were high and were similar to those previously reported. Participants’ reports of the frequency of racism in their lives were unrelated to participants’ age, social class, and education, but were related to gender, with men reporting more frequent racism than women. Experiencing racism was strongly related to total psychiatric symptoms. This cross-validation study provides further evi-dence on the reliability and validity of the SRE.