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

本研究项目将促进表观种族和民族的定量测量。种族和民族分类通常被认为是自然的、分离的和相互排斥的。一个人要么是非裔美国人，要么是亚裔美国人，要么是欧裔美国人，要么是西班牙裔美国人。但许多人是混血血统或混血身份。越来越多的证据表明，通常与种族和族裔类别有关的社会歧视和不平等在这些类别内有所不同。然而，由于严重的测量问题，这方面的研究受到了限制。最广泛使用的衡量肤色的方法是不可靠的，除了肤色之外，还没有被普遍接受的量化种族或民族外貌的方法。该项目采用了在许多其他领域使用的统计测量模型，以产生新的种族和民族外观的定量测量。调查人员将开发开源软件来生成这些措施。从社会的角度来看，这些结果将对政府机构和法院产生重要影响。例如，表型歧视被认为是对公民权利的侵犯。然而，由于怀疑表现型是否可以客观衡量，法官们在实践中一直在努力并普遍拒绝这种说法。这个研究项目将测试关于种族和民族外貌的新的定量测量方法的稳健性的假设，这些方法对被观察者的着装和面部表情的变化以及观察者的身份和情绪的变化都有影响。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：对于种族和民族外貌是否存在社会共识？种族/民族外貌在多大程度上取决于被观察者的身体特征，还是取决于被观察者的着装或社会经济地位等其他因素？研究者将检验不同的方法是否能引出种族/民族感知（例如，感知的肤色，感知的刻板印象，感知的祖先）产生的测量结果在不同的观察者群体中是一致的，并且对被观察者的明显地位和态度的变化以及观察者的情绪是稳健的。

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.