When a Name Gives You Pause: Racialized Names and Time-to-Adoption in a County Dog Shelter

Decades of research in the audit study tradition have examined how racialized names are associated with outcomes in hiring, housing, and other domains. These studies are premised on the idea that a person is attached to the racialized name, and that any penalties associated with racialized names are due to (often latent) racial stereotypes. But what if there is no person behind the name? In other words, what happens when racialized names are distinct from race itself? In this talk, I present results from a study examining how the use of racialized names affects dogs’ adoption outcomes in a high-volume county shelter. I use original data scraped from the web over a six-month period, combined with an online survey experiment designed to capture the racialized association of each dog’s name. Results from this study will be discussed, along with implications for social scientific research on race and inequality.

https://sociology.osu.edu/people/quadlin.2