Using ethnicity as a classification variable in health research: perpetuating the myth of biological determinism, serving socio-political agendas, or making valuable contributions to medical sciences?
Using ethnicity as a classification variable in health research: perpetuating the myth of biological determinism, serving socio-political agendas, or making valuable contributions to medical sciences?
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DOI：
10.1080/13557859998029
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发表时间：
1999-11-01
影响因子：
3.1
通讯作者：
Anand, S S
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Anand, S S
需要一种有效的方法来一致和可靠地对人类物种进行分类，无论是为了突出人类群体之间的相似之处，如智力或体能，还是为了消除关于群体差异的神话，或者发现疾病的“新”风险因素。与通常基于肤色和身体特征差异的种族划分不同，族裔是一个复杂的概念，既有社会文化因素，也有生物学因素。然而，由于这一术语的相对模糊性，对“族裔”结构的解释并不简单，其定义往往是手头的研究项目所特有的。因此，开展民族性研究需要意识到民族性概念与种族之间的差异，承认民族性结构的复杂性，并要求研究者对这一术语的使用做出明确的定义。
There is a need for a valid way to classify the human species consistently and reliably, be it to highlight similarities between human populations such as intelligence or physical capacity, to dispel myths about group differences, or to discover 'novel' risk factors for diseases. In contrast to racial divisions, which are usually based on differences in skin colour and physical features, ethnicity is a complex concept which has both socio-cultural and biological components. However, because of the relative vagueness of the term, the interpretation of the 'Ethnicity' construct is not simple, and its definition is often unique to the research project at hand. Therefore conducting ethnicity-research necessitates being aware of the differences between the concept of ethnicity and race, acknowledgement of the complexity of the ethnicity construct, and requires that a clear definition of the use of this term be made explicit by the researcher.