Islamophobia — What is it and how is it measured?
Islamophobia is an extremely contentious topic in contemporary society — particularly in light of recent terrorist attacks perpetrated against the Western world. If unfamiliar with the subject, Lee et al. (2009) operationalize Islamophobia: “the fear of Muslims and the Islamic faith”. Simple enough, right? It is troubling to think that a religion that represents such a large amount of people can be so easily homogenized, in the same vein as clowns or spiders. Through Google Trends, we can see the growth of the usage of the term, “Islamophobia” (Figure 1).
The most obvious thing that jumps out in this graph is the spikes in usage in 2015. The first spike coincides with the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris and the second coincides with the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. Most other spikes coincide with other instances of terrorism perpetrated by Muslims on the developed world. Unfortunately, the Western world is the victim of only a minority of Islamist terrorist attacks, and these other attacks often get overlooked (Figure 2).
Widespread reporting and fear mongering have translated these fatal incidents into a testable construct, which Lee et al. set out to measure. The items on this scale “reflected the affective, behavioral, and cognitive aspects of the fear experience” but did not “identify a particular ethnic group to avoid confounding the [Islamophobia Scale] with prejudice toward a specific population” (Lee et al., 2009). A potential confound of this measure would be the time period in which people are tested. As is evidenced by Figure 1, Islamophobic sentiments ebb and flow according to when Islamist terrorist attacks on the Western world occur.
The testing of Lee et al.’s construct took place at an university, which has sampling confounds (Whites and Republicans were grossly overrepresented) that are difficult to avoid. Items from the questionnaire focused on racial attitudes and the acceptance of cultural differences used a Likert-type scale with 5 options ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Factor analysis was conducted on the test items to create subscales. With the results analyzed, the Islamophobia Scale had very strong internal consistency (coefficient alpha of 0.92 for one subscale and 0.94 for the other) as well as positively correlated subscales (r = 0.66). White, Christian, and Republican students all had higher scores then their non-White, non-Christian, and non-Republican counterparts. Additionally, students who reported they had Muslim friends had substantially lower scores.
Lee et al.’s scale illustrates the out-group homogeneity principle well. Those not in our in-group seem to be less variable and homogenous. A lack of perceived variation is a significant cause of Islamophobia. When Muslims are not seen as a singular ominous group (which is often the impression given by some media outlets) but humanized (as evidenced by the scores of students who were friends with Muslims), they become simply that — human.
Google Trends. (n.d.). Retrieved March 20, 2016, from https://www.google.com/trends/
Lee, S. A., Gibbons, J. A., Thompson, J. M., & Timani, H. S. (2009). The Islamophobia Scale: Instrument Development and Initial Validation. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 19(2), 92–105.
