What’s in a name? Is Bernie more likely to get a call back for an apartment than Jamal or Abdul? The answer is most likely, at least on Craigslist (and we have just as much reason to believe elsewhere as well) . We explore this issue in a new paper that just yesterday was accepted for publication in City & Community. This journal is the official journal of the Community & Urban Sociology section of the American Sociological Association, and we think a fine home for this work.
We explore this issue using a novel form of an online audit study. Past audit studies have looked at whether people get call backs for resumes, turned down on the telephone and call backs for apartments in person. Our work is somewhat different in the sense that we define a methodology for scaling up this sort of work by using an automated emailing program that I designed and implemented. Brent Berry, my co-author from the University of Toronto came up with the idea and we worked rather hard in putting the pieces together over the last several years.
It will appear in issue 10(4) sometime later this year. A pre-print copy of the article is available here for download [pdf link]. Please note that there will be some slight typographical changes between this version and the final version (so be careful when quoting), but the substantive writing should be the same.
