I'm setting up a (not very scientific) market research form that random people on the internet can fill out after interviewing random people in elevators. (Whether this is a good idea is its own topic). I want a section for the (probable) race of the interviewee. I was starting to list the typical races I'm used to seeing on forms, but realized "African American" is just silly in an international audience, and "Black" doesn't sound professional, whether or not it's a legitimate term.
Are there standard terms used by the international (or at least European) community? I was leaning towards:
European Descent African Descent Native American Descent Asian/Pacific Islander Latin American
And then saying something like "if unsure or ambiguous, check all that seem likely". (Given time constraints and awkwardness, I don't think it's worth asking the interviewee for clarification)
Posted by ambyr (Member # 7616) on :
Native American is a U.S.-specific term; in Canada it's First Nations.
There also seem to be a bunch of categories missing (Aboriginal? Middle Eastern? Do you expect people from Russia to check European or Asian, and do you care?)
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
Bleah, I had just copied the first demographic poll I found on the internet. "White" may just be a better descriptor than European-whatever.
This might just be my own bias, but Native American honestly makes more intuitive sense to me than First Nations. (If I were an alien learning English and heard the former, I could figure out what it meant. I've have absolutely no idea what First Nations meant)
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
First Nations is actually a subset of Native American, there are groups like the Inuit that aren't included.
ex: The census phrases it like this: "18. Is this person an Aboriginal person, that is, First Nations (North American Indian), Métis or Inuk (Inuit)?"
If it helps, the census also has two ethnicity-based questions:
quote: 17. What were the ethnic or cultural origins of this person's ancestors?
An ancestor is usually more distant than a grandparent.
For example, Canadian, English, French, Chinese, East Indian, Italian, German, Scottish, Irish, Cree, Mi'kmaq, Salish, Métis, Inuit, Filipino, Dutch, Ukrainian, Polish, Portuguese, Greek, Korean, Vietnamese, Jamaican, Jewish, Lebanese, Salvadorean, Somali, Colombian, etc.
Specify as many origins as applicable using capital letters.
quote: 19. Is this person:
Mark more than one or specify, if applicable.
This information is collected in accordance with the Employment Equity Act and its Regulations and Guidelines to support programs that promote equal opportunity for everyone to share in the social, cultural, and economic life of Canada.
White South Asian (e.g., East Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, etc.) Chinese Black Filipino Latin American Arab Southeast Asian (e.g., Vietnamese, Cambodian, Malaysian, Laotian, etc.) West Asian (e.g., Iranian, Afghan, etc.) Korean Japanese Other - Specify __________________
Posted by ambyr (Member # 7616) on :
And this is what the US census uses:
quote: 8. Is the person of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin?
No, not of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin Yes, Mexican, Mexican Am., Chicano Yes, Puerto Rican Yes, Cuban Yes, another Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin — Print origin, for example, Argentinean, Colombian, Dominican, Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, Spaniard, and so on.
9. What is the person's race?
White [includes European, Middle Eastern, and North African ancestry] Black or African American American Indian or Alaska Native — Print name of enrolled or principal tribe. Asian Indian Chinese Filipino Other Asian — Print race, for example, Hmong, Laotian, Thai, Pakistani, Cambodian, and so on. Japanese Korean Vietnamese Native Hawaiian Guamanian or Chamorro Samoan Other Pacific Islander — Print race, for example, Fijian, Tongan, and so on. Some other race — Print race.
Posted by Jeff C. (Member # 12496) on :
Have any of you seen Battlestar Galactica?
If so, do you remember Adama, the old man in charge? He was a commander/captain/admeral.
Well, the cast of BSG and other celebrities were invited (a few years ago) to the United Nations to sit in and talk about world affairs (I know, it doesn't really make sense, but there you go). The guy (Adama actor) kept hearing the UN representatives using the world "race" to define various peoples of the world. Well, after a while he voiced his concerns to Whoopie Goldburg. When people kept using "race" like this, Whoopy finally decided to say something. She said something like, "Do you have something you want to say about this?" to her friend.
The actor (adama) said that "there's only one race, and that's the human race" and that we shouldn't distinguish each other by using a word like race, because it doesn't make sense.
After that, the UN actually changed their charter so that race doesn't have the same meaning anymore. That's right, a science fiction actor actually changed a UN policy.
I thought it was pretty awesome.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
That is pretty awesome.
I don't actually know that the race section will even be important, but I figured it might be useful to see if types of responses correlated at all with anything. I'm on the fence about whether Olmos' comment is the direction we should be going. I agree with it in principle, but in practical purposes, I don't know that we're there yet. I think there's still a lot of information that's important that correlates with race-descriptors, whether those descriptors are based on anything real.
The census questions are useful, but a little more precise than I expect the average interviewer to be able to guess correctly in a minute-long conversation. I ended up going with:
White Black Latin American Native American Asian/Pacific-Islander Arab Indian Aboriginal Other
And then a "description" section where the interviewer can list any other information that seemed relevant to them.
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
That could get kind of confusing, I think some areas (British and Canadian especially) will classify Indians (from India) into the Asian category without reading down to "Indian".
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
If I list Indian above Asian, does that alleviate the problem?
Posted by ambyr (Member # 7616) on :
Agree with Mucus; Asian in the U.S. without elaboration seems to be generally used to mean "East Asian," but that's not the same elsewhere.
Posted by ambyr (Member # 7616) on :
Why not separate out East Asian, South Asian/Indian, Southeast Asian, Pacific Islander, and Central Asian?
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
I think the ambiguity in "Indian" is difficult to fix with just ordering, if space is an issue, I'd rather replace aboriginal with South Asian (and get rid of Indian, change Asian to East Asian).
Posted by dkw (Member # 3264) on :
I think that in many cases many of your interviewers won't be able to determine which of those someone falls into without asking.
Posted by Stone_Wolf_ (Member # 8299) on :
Great story Jeff...what word did they replace "race" with? Ethnicity?
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
I think that most should be able to do white, black, east asian/pacific islander, south asian, and latin american without asking. I agree that aboriginal, native american, and arab are going to be tough though.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
Honestly I'm speaking as someone who sometimes has a hard time telling Latin American people from East Asian people. (I am very not-proud of that). I'm not sure how badly I compare to other Americans or to the rest of the world, but if I had a form as precise as the census to try and fill out without asking the person, I'd have to check a third of the boxes and put a bunch of question marks there.
So I may be biased, and shifting the form in a direction that I would find less embarrassing to fill out.
I changed Asian to East Asian and left Indian as Indian.
I honestly wouldn't be able to tell the difference between most Arab and Indian people unless they had other cultural clues, but I'm hoping the rest of the world is better at that than I am.
I probably wouldn't recognize aboriginal traits at all, but I'm assuming that's really only an issue in Australia where people will presumably be much better at it.
Posted by advice for robots (Member # 2544) on :
Wouldn't it be easiest just to let them specify their own ethnicity on a blank line, rather than give them an infinite amount of choices? Most people have a preferred way of defining their ethnicity. Plus, depending on how they answer, you'd get more information for your poll.
Posted by AchillesHeel (Member # 11736) on :
Thats good, maybe gender as well. You might get some interesting responses.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
Well, again, its the interviewer who's making this judgement call, so I'd be getting the interviewer's take on ethnicity, not the actual person whose ethnicity is being determined. It's also harder to tally up, when people are writing "black" and "African American" and "Chinese" and "Asian" (and a lot of the "Chinese" answers are actually Korean or whatever).
My "sex" question is worded "What is the subject's apparent sex?" with the options being "male", "female", and "unsure/other".
Posted by Stone_Wolf_ (Member # 8299) on :
I always wonder why people use the word "sex" instead of "gender"...sex has multiple meanings where as gender is exactly what is meant.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
Sex refers to physical traits, gender refers to psychological traits.
Posted by advice for robots (Member # 2544) on :
quote:Originally posted by Raymond Arnold: Well, again, its the interviewer who's making this judgement call, so I'd be getting the interviewer's take on ethnicity, not the actual person whose ethnicity is being determined.
I see. I thought it was a question being asked of the interviewee.
Posted by ambyr (Member # 7616) on :
quote:Originally posted by advice for robots:
quote:Originally posted by Raymond Arnold: Well, again, its the interviewer who's making this judgement call, so I'd be getting the interviewer's take on ethnicity, not the actual person whose ethnicity is being determined.
I see. I thought it was a question being asked of the interviewee.
Me too. I think any attempt to ask a third party to judge someone's racial identity based on appearance is going to be fraught with peril--unless you're trying to study how they react to the person based on their perception of their race, in which case I could see the value. But I'd stress the question is solely about their perception.
Posted by Stone_Wolf_ (Member # 8299) on :
quote:Originally posted by Raymond Arnold: Sex refers to physical traits, gender refers to psychological traits.
Welcome to Hatrack, you are wrong.
quote:Today, the distinction is strictly followed in some contexts, like feminist literature,[3] and in documents written by organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO),[4] but in most contexts, even in some areas of social sciences, the meaning of gender has expanded to include "sex" or even to replace the latter word.[1][2] Although this gradual change in the meaning of gender can be traced to the 1980s, a small acceleration of the process in the scientific literature was observed when the Food and Drug Administration started to use "gender" instead of "sex" in 1993.[5] "Gender" is now commonly used even to refer to the physiology of nonhuman animals, without any implication of social gender roles.[2]
quote:Originally posted by Raymond Arnold: Sex refers to physical traits, gender refers to psychological traits.
In that case, you should use the word "gender" unless you are asking your interviewers to strip search the interviewees.
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
Indian is too vague and too easily confused. In Trinidad, we have West Indians, East Indians and Amerindians. Since I suspect you are referring to people from the Indian subcontinent, specify "Asian Indian", "East Indian" or "South Asian". The people I know from the region prefer "South Asian" as the racial group includes people from India,Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afganistan,and several other countries.
Posted by Stone_Wolf_ (Member # 8299) on :
They don't have to strip search...just ask.
"Pardon me, but are your genitals internal mostly, or external?"
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
quote:In that case, you should use the word "gender" unless you are asking your interviewers to strip search the interviewees.
Correct. My bad.
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
Are anyone's genitals truly "external" (barring surgical removal)?
Posted by Stone_Wolf_ (Member # 8299) on :
That's a very personal question Rabbit...and you will have to buy me a few drinks before I answer it.
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
One more thing. In many places outside the US, "mixed racial" is an important category. In fact, the US is the only place I know where a person is required to declare one race.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
quote:Originally posted by Stone_Wolf_:
quote:Originally posted by Raymond Arnold: Sex refers to physical traits, gender refers to psychological traits.
Welcome to Hatrack, you are wrong.
quote:Today, the distinction is strictly followed in some contexts, like feminist literature,[3] and in documents written by organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO),[4] but in most contexts, even in some areas of social sciences, the meaning of gender has expanded to include "sex" or even to replace the latter word.[1][2] Although this gradual change in the meaning of gender can be traced to the 1980s, a small acceleration of the process in the scientific literature was observed when the Food and Drug Administration started to use "gender" instead of "sex" in 1993.[5] "Gender" is now commonly used even to refer to the physiology of nonhuman animals, without any implication of social gender roles.[2]
You can find people using the words interchangeably. You can also find plenty of people who care a lot about the differences and for whom two different words are important for discussion purposes.
Posted by advice for robots (Member # 2544) on :
"Are your genitals connected or disconnected?"
Posted by Stone_Wolf_ (Member # 8299) on :
Sex is also a physical act of intercourse, as well as in the broader sense includes many other acts which are not limited to strict intercourse.
If some asks you what your gender is, I doubt highly that anyone but a very small percent will do anything but answer male or female.
Sex is also a part of orientation...*shrug* it is nit picky, I just have a strong personal preference for the word gender.
Posted by ambyr (Member # 7616) on :
quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: One more thing. In many places outside the US, "mixed racial" is an important category. In fact, the US is the only place I know where a person is required to declare one race.
You aren't, at least not for the census. You're encouraged to check all the boxes that apply. Which isn't quite the same as having "mixed" be a unified category, I suppose, but it's far from having to declare only one race.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
quote:If some asks you what your gender is, I doubt highly that anyone but a very small percent will do anything but answer male or female.
Depends on what you mean by a small percentage. There are people who identify male or female, but are physically the opposite. There are people who identify as neither male nor female, or as genderfluid.
Statistics are hard to come by here, but people who actually HAVE undergone sex reassignment surgery are a little less than 1%. That doesn't include people who can't afford it, are closeted, etc, or many other ways you can be gender a-typical. My guess is that the number of people who would confound your simplistic gender/sex model in one way or another is around 2-3%.
I still see "sex" listed as a box to fill out on forms with some frequency. I'm not more confused by it than I am by signs that say "Fine for Parking." This is not a place where there is an explicitly correct answer, and I really don't think "Welcome to Hatrack, you are wrong!" is the greatest way to signal your dissent in this instance.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
quote:You aren't, at least not for the census. You're encouraged to check all the boxes that apply. Which isn't quite the same as having "mixed" be a unified category, I suppose, but it's far from having to declare only one race.
(In my "race" question, the instructions currently say "if unsure, check all that seem likely.")
Posted by ambyr (Member # 7616) on :
quote:Originally posted by Raymond Arnold:
quote:You aren't, at least not for the census. You're encouraged to check all the boxes that apply. Which isn't quite the same as having "mixed" be a unified category, I suppose, but it's far from having to declare only one race.
(In my "race" question, the instructions currently say "if unsure, check all that seem likely.")
That seems like it's going to confound "I think it's likely that he's A and B" with "I think it's likely that he's A or B" which are two very different answers.
Posted by Stone_Wolf_ (Member # 8299) on :
When it comes to your survey, yes, there is no explicitly correct answer. Either "sex" or "gender" would work.
As to your statement that "gender refers to psychological traits" I do think you are incorrect, and showed it with evidence.
To my use of "Welcome to Hatrack, you are wrong." that was just in good fun, sorry if it wasn't taken that way.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
Apologies as well. I know you can find people using the words to mean various things, but in any discussion I've participated in where physical and psychological attributes mattered separately, those are the definitions that I've heard used.
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
quote:Statistics are hard to come by here, but people who actually HAVE undergone sex reassignment surgery are a little less than 1%.
What's your source on that? I tried to find some numbers a while back and the only numbers I could find were 1/30,000 for Male to Female and 1/100,000 for Female to Male. Even if the actual numbers are 100 times greater than that, its still a small fraction of one percent of the population.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
I may very well be wrong about that. I googled "percentage of transgender people" and clicked the first thing that came up. What it actually says is "between .25 and 1%," and then it has more statistics that I didn't bother to read at first and this was overall sloppy of me and I apologize.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
(I know the total percentage of gender/sex atypicality is small, but I also have enough exposure to it that I think it's important for people to be aware of and not to exclude by default)
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
That's an estimate of total transgender people, not those who have undergone surgery (or even hormone therapy). I would not be surprised if the real number turned out to be in that range.
Posted by Annie (Member # 295) on :
quote:(and a lot of the "Chinese" answers are actually Korean or whatever).
Wait, what? I don't know ANY Korean, Japanese or Southeast Asian people who would identify themselves as Chinese. Is that what you meant? Self-identification? Taiwanese people won't even identify as Chinese, even though ethnically they are.
Also, "Aboriginal" doesn't just apply to Australia. Especially if this is going to be used internationally, you're going to get a lot of people who would identify themselves as Aboriginal, meaning natives of wherever they are. Again, in Taiwan, since that's what I have a lot of experience with, there are Aboriginal Taiwanese who would define themselves that way. And I believe Spanish speaking South Americans of Indian descent ("Native American," though they would call themselves "Indios") would call themselves Aboriginals because of the Spanish cognate.
Anyway. The more interesting thing I wanted to talk about is how differently race is viewed even in Latin America. Once I got on this string of Wikipedia articles about the old laws in the US about who is considered "black" and "white," the phenomenon of "passing" and crazy stuff like Paper Bag Balls. (Look it up!) Somewhere in one of the articles I found that day it talked about a black man from the US (where "black" means "any bit black at all") was interviewing a "black" man from Brazil. He asked the Brazilian man, "What is it like being black in Brazil?" The man replied, a bit puzzled and offended, "I'm not black." In his conception, the fact that he was very light complected, as many African-Americans are, made him a lot less black than others.
In fact, my boyfriend, who is Honduran, was telling me about how race is viewed in Latin America and told me about a whole system of gradations they use in Brazil to identify "race" that has 20 or 30 gradations all based on skin and hair color. Some of them overlap with ethnicities, some of them don't. And the funny thing is, we meet a Latino or Latina and think subconsciously, "Oh, you're a brown person." Whereas someone like my boyfriend's mother was famous in her hometown in Honduras for being a "white person." It's very cultural.
Posted by Annie (Member # 295) on :
Also, there's research that shows that when people are asked their race in scientific studies they perform differently than when they aren't asked. Blacks, for example, perform much better on academic tasks, specifically, when their race wasn't asked and their picture wasn't taken. It's a really interesting phenomenon having to do with stereotypes.
Bottom line is, unless it's vitally important to your study, I wouldn't even include the race question.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
Again, the people weren't being asked. The interviewer was making their best guess. So if I gave them specific categories like Chinese/Korean, they'd be more likely to get it wrong and the information might end up less accurate than if I just said "East Asian."
Your Central America story is pretty apt though.
It wasn't that important to the study, I was just curious if any trends would emerge. (My study was not particularly scientific in the first place - it was basically poor man's market research for another website I frequent)
Posted by Annie (Member # 295) on :
Oh, I see. That makes a big difference.
Posted by Glenn Arnold (Member # 3192) on :
quote:I always wonder why people use the word "sex" instead of "gender"...sex has multiple meanings where as gender is exactly what is meant.
Because the current meaning of gender is a new phenomenon, which is a byproduct of language education.
The word "gender" at one point meant something like: "the ability of a word to convey a trait."
"Mountainous" engenders tallness, as well as massiveness. Whereas "towering" engenders tallness only. "Snail-like" engenders slowness, or perhaps sliminess. Etc. This has nothing to do with sex.
People rarely used the term, but it got picked up by foreign language teachers, because masculine and feminine genders are common in romance languages. That is, the words in those languages engender masculinity and femininity, so it was necessary to explain to English speaking students.
As "gender" was associated with sexual characteristics, it was eventually re-purposed as a euphemism for "sex," because at the same time, "sex" was taking on erotic connotations that it hadn't had earlier.
On the other hand, "sex" means precisely what you mean when you say "gender."
People don't have sex characteristics, they have sexual characteristics.
You can't have sex with a person, you can only have sexual intercourse.
The modern use of the word "sex" alone is merely an abbreviation.
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
quote:The modern use of the word "sex" alone is merely an abbreviation.
Was. Pretty much nobody thinks of "having sex" as *short* for "having sexual intercourse", just as another way of saying roughly the same thing (but with rather different connotations in many contexts).
Posted by Glenn Arnold (Member # 3192) on :
I would argue that if there's a longer way to say it, then the shorter way to say it is an abbreviated version, regardless of how common the usage is.
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
That's not what abbreviation means. An abbreviation is a *specifically shortened* form intended to stand in for the other, not just a word with a pretty much completely independent existence that happens to be the same as the starting letters of another pair of words that can be used in roughly the same situations. Intent is extremely important.
Posted by Glenn Arnold (Member # 3192) on :
abbreviate [əˈbriːvɪˌeɪt] vb (tr) 1. to shorten (a word or phrase) by contraction or omission of some letters or words 2. to shorten (a speech or piece of writing) by omitting sections, paraphrasing, etc. 3. to cut short [from the past participle of Late Latin abbreviāre, from Latin brevis brief] abbreviator n
Exactly! "To shorten" is an action taken with intent. If you're not shortening anything, but just using a form that happens to be a prefix, you're not abbreviating.
For instance, I'm not "shortening" masterpiece when I say master, despite the latter being a prefix of the former.
Posted by Annie (Member # 295) on :
Glenn, gender as a noun is different from gender as a verb. What you've said is correct, that one of the meanings of the word is more broad than the idea of sex, but it's not "due to language education" and it's not related to the verb gender.
Gender used to, and still does, mean a kind or class. It's related to the French word genre, which we also use in the sense of "sort" or "class."
The usage of gender to mean male or female dates from the 15th century, almost as old as the original word in English. So though it did arise later, it wasn't a recent invention due to prudishness, although that usage did become much more common in the 20th century to distinguish it from the word sex.
Posted by Glenn Arnold (Member # 3192) on :
Fugu: Where "exactly" does the definition I gave say anything about intent? What you are claiming, essentially, is that LOL is no longer an abbreviation, because there are people who now use it without understanding what it's an abbreviation of. Ignorance doesn't make it any less an abbreviation.
Annie, I didn't give a timeline, but essentially we're in agreement. The original use for gender as "male" or "female" was as a class of words, to describe male and female words in romance languages. As to whether it's a "recent invention," that depends on what you call recent, but it doesn't appear to date prior to the 20th century to refer to a person's sex.
From the Online Etymological dictionary:
quote:As sex took on erotic qualities in 20c., gender came to be the common word used for "sex of a human being," often in feminist writing with reference to social attributes as much as biological qualities; this sense first attested 1963.
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
quote:Fugu: Where "exactly" does the definition I gave say anything about intent? What you are claiming, essentially, is that LOL is no longer an abbreviation, because there are people who now use it without understanding what it's an abbreviation of. Ignorance doesn't make it any less an abbreviation.
To answer your first question, here's where it says something about intent:
quote:to shorten
You can't do that without intent. It isn't possible.
As for LOL, if at some point it stops being used as an abbreviation, then I will be claiming that. Right now pretty most people are using it as an intentional abbreviation, I feel, even if they'd be unlikely to type the full version.
But how about another example: "okay". Okay is a word, and an entirely standalone word with its own meaning. It was virtually certainly an abbreviation at some point, but there's nobody alive now who knows for sure what of. I wouldn't call it an abbreviation at all today, because that requires several billion people (it's a loan word in pretty much every large country; that silly pair of syllables turned out to be a remarkably compelling linguistic tidbit) to be abbreviating (shortening) something most of them don't even know ever had a long form, and not a single person of whom knows what the long form it may once have had ever was. And that's just a little absurd for me. At some point, words stop being abbreviations.
Posted by Glenn Arnold (Member # 3192) on :
quote:You can't do that without intent. It isn't possible.
Bull.
But this is an amazingly trivial thing to derail a thread over. So I'm done. Have fun.