The importance of being “other”: A natural experiment about lived race over time |
The importance of being “other”: A natural experiment about lived race over time
Social Science Research
Volume 36, Issue 1 (March 2007)
pages 159-174
DOI: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2005.11.002
J. Scott Brown, Associate Professor of Gerontology, Scripps Research Fellow
Miami University, Oxford, Ohio
Steven Hitlin, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Iowa
Glen H. Elder, Jr., Research Professor of Sociology and Psychology
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Despite recent concern with the measurement of race, almost no scholarship has explored the residual response category of “other” itself. The 2000 census included a significant number selecting “other,” suggesting that the option was not simply a residual response. Using a serendipitous change in the measurement of race in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we explore the social reality of the “other” category at three levels of analysis: self-identification, external attribution, and structural interpretation. Far from being a residual category, we find that “other” is a meaningful social category for about half of the Hispanics in Add Health. Current measurement conventions that distinguish between race and ethnicity, while established for laudable reasons, misrepresent the ways that Americans—Hispanic and otherwise—utilize social categories. Individuals do not treat Hispanics differently than blacks or Asians when seen as members of a meaningful social group. The separation of race from ethnicity leads to confusion and measurement difficulty. Such problems are compounded when “other” is removed as a potential response.
1. Introduction
“We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don’t know.”
W. H. Auden (1907–1973)Concern with racial measurement has flourished in recent years (Harris and Sim, 2002; Hirschman et al., 2000) as sociologists and demographers have increasingly focused on the fluid nature of a once taken-for-granted concept. The growing number of multiracial individuals in the United States has underscored the difficulty of adequately measuring what has long been understood to be a meaningful and stable criterion for social grouping. Studies of racialfluidity and multiracial individuals have largely overlooked an important aspect of racial measurement in the US, namely, the (supposedly) residual “other” category. Originally intended to allow individuals more latitude for recording their self-understandings of race (see Snipp, 2003), this category has a substantive reality in its own right (Hirschman et al., 2000). In almost all cases in the 2000 census, the “other” category represents a proxy for “Hispanic,” demonstrating that the lived experience of millions of individuals contradicts the academic reification between race and ethnicity. An in-depth examination of the “other” category suggests that current racial measurement conventions do not accurately reflect Americans’ social reality.
Using a serendipitous change in the measurement of race in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we track individuals’ changes in racial self-identification across time when the “other” option is removed from the racial measurement item. We explore the socialreality of the “other” category at three levels of analysis: self identification, external attribution, and structural interpretation. This approach extends traditional concerns with racialmeasurement that focus on self-identification in two directions. First, it allows us to examine the process of social attribution as it reflects external views of racial/ethnic group membership. Second, we suggest that this measurement convention biases social science research findings. All three levels of analysis are based on social psychological understandings of the psychological process of social categorization that underlies the perception of race/ethnicity. We find that “other” is an important response category for Hispanics, the best proxy they have available within the currently separated race and ethnicity format. Such self-reports have profound implications for national statistics and social science analyses. We conclude with a call for altering the official racial measurement instrument to more accurately reflect the cognitive processes that individuals use to delineate their meaningful social groups.
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Tags: Glen Elder, Glen H. Elder, J. Scott Brown, Social Science Research, Steven Hitlin