Collaborative Research: Measuring Apparent Race and Ethnicity with Applications to the Study of Discrimination

这项研究项目将推进对表观种族和民族的量化测量。种族和民族类别通常被认为是自然的、离散的和相互排斥的。比如说，一个人要么是非洲裔美国人，要么是亚裔美国人，要么是欧洲裔美国人，要么是西班牙裔美国人。但许多人是混血儿或混血儿。越来越多的证据表明，传统上与种族和族裔类别有关的社会歧视和不平等在这些类别中各不相同。然而，由于严重的测量问题，这项研究一直受到限制。最广泛使用的肤色衡量标准并不可靠，也没有普遍接受的方法来量化肤色以外的种族或民族外观。该项目采用了许多其他领域已经使用的统计测量模型，以产生新的、量化的种族和民族形象测量方法。调查人员将开发用于生成这些措施的开源软件。从社会角度来看，这些结果将对政府机构和法院产生重要影响。例如，表现型歧视被理解为侵犯公民权利。然而，由于对表型是否是可以客观测量的东西的怀疑，法官们在实践中一直难以接受并普遍拒绝这种说法。这项研究项目将测试关于新的种族和民族外观量化指标对被观察者衣着和面部表情变化以及进行观察的人的身份和情绪变化的稳健性假设。该项目旨在回答长期困扰学术研究人员、政府机构和法院的问题：社会对种族和民族外观是否存在共识？种族/民族外观在多大程度上取决于被观察者的身体属性或其他因素，如被观察者的着装或社会经济地位？研究人员将检查不同的种族/民族感知(例如，感知的肤色、感知的刻板印象和感知的祖先)是否产生在不同的观察者群体中一致的衡量标准，并对被观察者的表观地位和态度以及观察者的情绪的变化保持稳健。

This research project will advance the quantitative measurement of apparent race and ethnicity. Racial and ethnic categories often are thought of as natural, discrete, and mutually exclusive. A person is either, say, an African-American, an Asian-American, a European-American, or an Hispanic-American. But many people are of mixed ancestry or mixed identity. There is growing evidence that the societal discrimination and inequalities conventionally associated with racial and ethnic categories vary within those categories. This body of research has been limited, however, by serious measurement problems. The most widely used measure of skin color is not reliable, and there is no generally accepted method for quantifying racial or ethnic appearance beyond skin color. This project adapts statistical measurement models that have been used in many other domains to produce new, quantitative measures of racial and ethnic appearance. The investigators will develop open-source software for generating the measures. From a societal perspective, these results will have important implications for government agencies and courts of law. Phenotype discrimination, for example, is understood to be a civil rights violation. Judges, however, have struggled with and generally rejected such claims in practice, due to doubts about whether phenotype is something that can be measured objectively.This research project will test hypotheses about the robustness of new, quantitative measures of racial and ethnic appearance to variation in the dress and facial expressions of the persons being observed and to variation in the identity and mood of the persons doing the observing. The project is designed to answer questions that have long confounded academic researchers, government agencies, and courts of law: Is there a societal consensus about racial and ethnic appearance? To what extent does racial/ethnic appearance depend on physical attributes of the person being observed or on other factors, such as dress or socioeconomic status of the person being observed? The investigators will examine whether different ways of eliciting race/ethnicity perceptions (e.g., perceived skin color, perceived stereotypicality, and perceived ancestry) yield measures that are congruent across different populations of observers and robust to variation in the apparent status and attitudes of the person being observed and the mood of the observer.