This study uses a factorial survey experiment to advance understanding of the social construction of hate crimes in the United States.
This dissertation aims to investigate what and how incident factors and respondents’ preexisting attitudes and beliefs influence the perceptions of a bias incident and the willingness to report such incidents. Following a three-paper format, this research explores the overarching research question by integrating a power-relation framework with a social psychological approach and providing empirical evidence to offer insights to tackle the underreporting issue of hate crimes. This dissertation utilizes a factorial survey experiment with randomized vignette assignments as the primary research method, combining survey and experimental research. The findings offer support for a power-relation framework in hate crime studies, which argues that racial hate crimes should be viewed as a social phenomenon that is not only a manifestation of racial hierarchy in society but also functions as a means to reinforce the racial orders to maintain the power relations in society. The findings further lead to three conclusions regarding racial hate crime perception and reporting. The first conclusion is that racial hate crimes should be viewed as both a product and a tool to reinforce the imbalanced power relations in society. The second conclusion is that individuals’ pre-existing attitudes and beliefs, as a reflection of the social structure, are crucial in forming racial hate crime perceptions and reporting decisions, as well as maintaining and challenging power relations. The third conclusion is that the relationship between incident characteristics, pre-existing attitude and belief, and reporting behaviors are not linear. Instead, racial hate crime reporting should be studied as a mediator driving the actual response to a potential racial hate crime.