Rethinking Ethnic and Racial Classifications

Abstract

One of the key research questions investigated in our study concerns the ability of official classifications to capture the racial/ethnic identifications of young ‘mixed race’ people, such as in the Census or other ethnic monitoring forms which are now rife in contemporary life. In Chapter 2 we explored respondents’ mostly unprompted selfdescriptions of themselves and in Chapter 3 how they would respond if they had to choose just one racial/ethnic group in which they felt they belonged. As we found in both these chapters, official forms of data collection on ethnicity are often reductionist, whereby respondents are asked to shoehorn their choices into pre-designated categories on a ‘best fit’ basis.