Publication type
Journal Article
Authors
Publication date
June 1, 2016
Summary:
This article is a review of issues associated with measuring ethnicity and using ethnicity measures in social science research. The review is oriented towards researchers who undertake secondary analyses of large-scale multipurpose social science datasets. The article begins with an outline of two main approaches used in social surveys to measure ethnicity, the ‘mutually exclusive category’ approach and the ‘multiple characteristics’ approach. We also describe approaches to the use of ethnicity measures in cross-national comparative research. We emphasise the value of sensitivity analyses. We also encourage researchers to carefully consider the possible relationships between ethnicity and other important variables in order to avoid spurious interpretations of the effects of ethnicity.
Published in
Methodological Innovations
Volume and page numbers
Volume: 9 , p.1 -10
DOI
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2059799116642885
ISSN
20597991
Subjects
Notes
Open Access
Creative Commons Non Commercial CC-BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
#523962