Hey everyone,
I'm doing some research [for academic writing] and gearing up for a more quantitative side of my project, investigating satisfaction people have with race labels, and what those race labels actually mean. I'm hoping this research will give perspective to folks behind private and public census decisions [by which I mean, bean-counters in charge of identifying demographics in both government and private sectors] on the impact of having people self-define their race with unsatisfactory labels.
What impact? I... I honestly don't know. That's part of the research. What I've done so far (and what I've read) suggests to me that people are dis-satisfied of the way we talk about race, and since I have a love affair with words, I'm sort of invested in figuring out what our language can do to improve the situation.
My own view is fairly myopic; I don't spend tons of time thinking about race, but I do get annoyed at certain race labels for my specific racial group. I can only imagine that this annoyance is compounded greatly for folks who invest significant parts of their lives in ideas concerning racial power structures, especially for people who do not directly benefit from the racial power structure, for whatever reason.
My goal is to get a survey of about 400 students at my university [or, if I can pull it off, a large enough semi-random sample to derive useful statistics for the U.S. population in general, but that's a pipe dream] and measure their sentiment toward various race terms.
I've got two problems that I hope you guys can help me with.
One--I'm at a genuine loss for what to ask in the survey, or how to ask it meaningfully. In seven interviews I conducted with black students, two wanted to be identified as Haitian or Haitain American, two wanted to be identified as brown, and the other three wanted either black and African American with two of those holding the terms to be interchangeable. I can't derive anything statistical from that, of course, except that this was all an organic response derived from the simple question, "Do you identify as black?" This is what makes me want to do this study. If such a simple-seeming question could elicit the passionate and thoughtful responses I got, it seems that demographic questions that give people no room to expand on their answers, that may very well be creating bad categories for people, could cause undue stress to the people answering questions and give the people asking questions data that ultimately paints a too-simple picture of an institution, user baser, population, etc.
What sorts of questions, suitable for a survey, could I ask that help narrow down race labels? Or is there an approach to this [that I could tackle quantifiably--I'm interested in more qualitative data, but sort of want to stop transcribing interviews for a while.] that I am missing?
My second problem is a technical one. I need to ascertain some sort of valid information about the user's race before I can narrow down a term that they may like better.
The approach I'm thinking of would first ask people to identify according to the race labels available on the registration forms at my university. Then ask them how satisfied they are with that label. And then ask them what label they would be most satisfied with.
I... I feel hemmed into distributing some sort of electronic survey, but I'm not sure how I'd go about building it. And if I did it on paper [Eeek], I have no idea how useful or practical it would be asking people to fill in.
I'm also not sure what other kinds of information I could gather that would be useful.
I'd appreciate any help from you guys narrowing my thoughts down a bit; either helping me form new or better research questions [mine are fuzzy and vague right now, because my interviews sort of blasted my research questions apart], helping me form survey questions, or just giving me some perspective on race labels in general.
Thanks for your time!
I'm doing some research [for academic writing] and gearing up for a more quantitative side of my project, investigating satisfaction people have with race labels, and what those race labels actually mean. I'm hoping this research will give perspective to folks behind private and public census decisions [by which I mean, bean-counters in charge of identifying demographics in both government and private sectors] on the impact of having people self-define their race with unsatisfactory labels.
What impact? I... I honestly don't know. That's part of the research. What I've done so far (and what I've read) suggests to me that people are dis-satisfied of the way we talk about race, and since I have a love affair with words, I'm sort of invested in figuring out what our language can do to improve the situation.
My own view is fairly myopic; I don't spend tons of time thinking about race, but I do get annoyed at certain race labels for my specific racial group. I can only imagine that this annoyance is compounded greatly for folks who invest significant parts of their lives in ideas concerning racial power structures, especially for people who do not directly benefit from the racial power structure, for whatever reason.
My goal is to get a survey of about 400 students at my university [or, if I can pull it off, a large enough semi-random sample to derive useful statistics for the U.S. population in general, but that's a pipe dream] and measure their sentiment toward various race terms.
I've got two problems that I hope you guys can help me with.
One--I'm at a genuine loss for what to ask in the survey, or how to ask it meaningfully. In seven interviews I conducted with black students, two wanted to be identified as Haitian or Haitain American, two wanted to be identified as brown, and the other three wanted either black and African American with two of those holding the terms to be interchangeable. I can't derive anything statistical from that, of course, except that this was all an organic response derived from the simple question, "Do you identify as black?" This is what makes me want to do this study. If such a simple-seeming question could elicit the passionate and thoughtful responses I got, it seems that demographic questions that give people no room to expand on their answers, that may very well be creating bad categories for people, could cause undue stress to the people answering questions and give the people asking questions data that ultimately paints a too-simple picture of an institution, user baser, population, etc.
What sorts of questions, suitable for a survey, could I ask that help narrow down race labels? Or is there an approach to this [that I could tackle quantifiably--I'm interested in more qualitative data, but sort of want to stop transcribing interviews for a while.] that I am missing?
My second problem is a technical one. I need to ascertain some sort of valid information about the user's race before I can narrow down a term that they may like better.
The approach I'm thinking of would first ask people to identify according to the race labels available on the registration forms at my university. Then ask them how satisfied they are with that label. And then ask them what label they would be most satisfied with.
I... I feel hemmed into distributing some sort of electronic survey, but I'm not sure how I'd go about building it. And if I did it on paper [Eeek], I have no idea how useful or practical it would be asking people to fill in.
I'm also not sure what other kinds of information I could gather that would be useful.
I'd appreciate any help from you guys narrowing my thoughts down a bit; either helping me form new or better research questions [mine are fuzzy and vague right now, because my interviews sort of blasted my research questions apart], helping me form survey questions, or just giving me some perspective on race labels in general.
Thanks for your time!
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