Mixed Race Studies

Researchers have been thinking about race all wrong

Vox
2014-12-15

Jenée Desmond-Harris

Studies on race are a dime a dozen: researchers examine its relationship to everything from elementary school test scores to who’s most likely to develop diabetes to which groups are overrepresented in ethnic militias to who Americans vote for, and we read about the results in news stories that are supposed to help us makes sense of the world.

But two Ivy League scholars say race is actually much more complicated than decades of social science research has acknowledged, and they’re working to change that.

In their paper, “Race a Bundle of Sticks: Designs that Estimate Effects of Seemingly Immutable Characteristics,” which will be published in the Annual Review of Political Science, Harvard’s Maya Sen and Princeton’s Omar Wasow explain that people who do quantitative research on race typically treat it as a single, fixed trait — what scientists call an “immutable characteristic.”

Instead, they argue, quantitative researchers should acknowledge that any one person’s racial identity is more like a collection of many different factors — from skin color, to neighborhood, to language, to socioeconomic status. With this insight, it becomes possible to study race not as a single, unchanging variable, but rather as a “a bundle of sticks” that can be pulled apart and carefully examined one by one…

Read the entire article here.

Race as a ‘Bundle of Sticks’: Designs that Estimate Effects of Seemingly Immutable Characteristics

Annual Review of Political Science
Number 19 (2016)
2014-10-05
49 pages

Maya Sen, Assistant Professor
Harvard Kennedy School
Harvard University

Omar Wasow, Assistant Professor
Department of Politics
Princeton University

Although understanding the role of race, ethnicity, and identity is central to political science, methodological debates persist about whether it is possible to estimate the effect of something “immutable.” At the heart of the debate is an older theoretical question: is race best understood under an essentialist or constructivist framework? In contrast to the “immutable characteristics” or essentialist approach, we argue that race should be operationalized as a “bundle of sticks” that can be disaggregated into elements. With elements of race, causal claims may be possible using two designs: (1) studies that measure the effect of exposure to a racial cue and (2) studies that exploit within-group variation to measure the effect of some manipulable element. These designs can reconcile scholarship on race and causation and offer a clear framework for future research.

Read an advanced copy of the entire article here.