Full face and Close-up Swatch Skintone Assessment: Colorism Scale Best Practices and Validation

Colorism is a form of discrimination that privileges lighter skinned individuals and disadvantages darker skinned individuals not only across race/ethnic groups, but within race-ethnic groups. Colorism is linked to poorer socioeconomic and health outcomes. Colorism is often measured by proxy using ratings of skin tone. However, concerns of biases within the scale may introduce a critical challenge for studying colorism. Bias include both in self- and observer- reports of skin tone which may reduce valid and reliable coding of an individual’s skin tone. For instance, White raters systemically rated Black individuals with less variability in skin tone and overall darker, while Black raters consistently rated Black individuals as lighter. The current studies goal is to improve the measurement of skin tone by implementing and evaluating an innovative training protocol for research assistants that is both culturally sensitive and uses best-practices for rating observational data. Our first aim will produce ratings of skin tone on a diverse sample of adolescents in an ongoing longitudinal study that began at birth. The addition of high-quality skin tone data on this deeply-phenotyped study of child mental and physical health will open new avenues of inquiry regarding the role of colorism for child development. The second aim will test whether using close ups of skin swatches versus the entire face changes the way raters assess skin tone. In other words, does the addition of phenotype characteristics in photos, as opposed to just an individual's skin tone, change the way raters use colorism scales?