The Race Project: Researching Race in the Social Sciences Researchers, Measures, and Scope of Studies

Abstract

While the concept and measurement of race has been a longstanding focus of social science research, capturing its significance requires a broader notion than utilizing only racial group categories. More recently, race has been treated as both a “characteristic” and a set of experiences that affect a multitude of life conditions and outcomes. This discussion and analysis moves away from treating race as only a categorical and static characteristic to a multi-dimensional concept that is dynamic, relational, and represents the intersection of individual, ecological, and structural components. By exploring the data collection of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research and studies that include race as a variable, we were able to trace how race has been used by social scientists over the past 60 years. Using an extensive coding protocol, we have attained key characteristics of the principal investigator(s) (PI), funders, scope of the overall study, and the use of different measures of race. As a result, this “meta-analysis” of social science surveys enabled this researcher to examine how these studies use a wide scope of racial “variables,” and the way in which PI characteristics affected the inclusion of race-related items. In addition, bivariate analysis is presented to examine social scientists’ tendencies in investigating race and inclusion of qualitative examples of item wordings and response categories. This overview of social science studies is placed in the context of conceptual and measurement issues surrounding the use and meaning of race. Hopefully this can serve to advance the discussion and strategic approaches in doing research about race and what should be incorporated in studying race as a lived experience.

Advancing racial equity in oral health (research): more of the same is not enough

“…Treating racial/ethnic categories as immutable entities also contributes to the naturalization of racial/ethnic inequities in oral health. Sociological accounts of race/ethnicity clearly show that it has much more to do with broader processes, such as power and oppression, than with biologyeven though racial/ ethnic classification may be based on phenotypic characteristics (2,6,48,49). When oral health studies make no reference to the social dynamics that give rise to racial/ ethnic categories, they may reinforce views that not only take race/ethnicity as a biological essence of individuals, but also lend credence to the idea that humanity can be easily and neatly divided into discrete racial/ethnic categories.…”

On the Ballot in 2020: Will the United States (finally) embrace civil rights?

“…The Race, Ethnicity, and Politics (REP) subfield has long argued that race is central to understanding American politics and that it is critical that we conceptualize these issues intersectionally, both at the individual and institutional levels (Strolovitch 2007;Novkov 2009;Beltrán 2011;Frances 2015;Hancock 2016;Hanchard 2019;Lemi and Brown 2019). Conceptualizations of race as an object of study has advanced in important ways since the mid-20th century but more needs to be done (Garcia 2017). We need to think deeply about the intersection between white supremacy and democratic governance in the United States.…”

For the Sga-Du-Gi (Community): Modern Day Cherokee Stickball

“…In his effort to determine what should be included in studying race in the social sciences, Garcia found that recent studies were more sensitive to multiple race categories than those conducted in earlier time periods. 48 James described how scholars who study race specifically treat it as a more dynamic and fluid concept that helps explain social processes, while others who simply use the concept of race treat it as a more fixed characteristic used to differentiate between "populations" in their studies. 49 George Henderson argued there are no pure races, which makes defining people by race arbitrary.…”