Different approaches to measure age and race discrimination in health care

Western populations are facing two major challenges today: The integration of the aging population and the increasing amount of immigrants into society. Indeed, this has never been as pertinent as today (e.g. Castles & Miller, 2009; Deutsche Bundesregierung, 2007). Given the current state of globalization with the emergence of new institutions and new forms of migration, the pressure on societies to deal with these unexpected changes is rising. For instance, the establishment of the European Union and the free boarders within it allows for increasing job mobility. As a result, not just the number of immigrants increases, but also the composition of all demographic cohorts, resulting in new consolidated minorities: elderly and race groups.
An increase in the number of minority groups can raise prejudice against them based on the majority’s fear of the increasing importance of the minority which in turn can lead to greater discrimination against the minorities (Becker, 1971).
This project aims at comparing different approaches to measure age and race discrimination in health care: Therefore 3 methods were used: a survey to measure the perceived age and race discrimination in medical treatment, a field experiment to compare the objective race and age discrimination and a lab experiment based on the game theory.