Replication data for: Beliefs about Black White Inequality: Differences among African Americans, Hispanics and Whites 1985-2010

Matthew Hunt's article, \"African American, Hispanic, and White Beliefs about Black/White Inequality, 1977–2004\" (ASR 2007), uses the General Social Survey to examine whether blacks, Hispanics and whites hold different beliefs about the causes of black-white inequality and whether these beliefs change over time. Based on his analyses, Hunt argues that whites privilege agency explanations relative to blacks and Hispanics while blacks focus more on discrimination and mixed structural-agency explanations compared to whites and Hispanics. Our analyses explore whether Hunt's conclusions change based on two improvements: (1) we use multiple imputation to address high levels of missing data instead of Hunt's approach of listwise deletion and (2) we expand the data set to include more recent years to examine whether events that occurred post 2008 (for instance, the recession and successful presidential candidacy of Barak Obama, a black man) influenced beliefs about black-white inequality. We find that Hunt’s conclusions are robust to multiple imputation. However, when we include more recent years in our data set and measure the effect of post-2008 years, we find that blacks are more likely to choose an agency explanation while whites are less likely to reference agency and mixed explanation.