Contesting Categories in Survey Data

• In Event: Contesting Racial, Ethnic, and Indigenous Categorization in Higher Education Research and Practice

Abstract

One way in which race structures and determines social life is through racial categorization, or the schema of racial categories and their boundaries that individuals operate within. Within scholarly research, racial categories are typically taken-for-granted, imagined as natural and that people have a shared understanding of their boundaries. However, viewing survey categories as a type of racial project brings into focus the socially constructed nature of these categorizations, and the lived realities of advantage and disadvantage they structure. Informed by Critical Quantitative (QuantCrit; Gillborn et al., 2018) analysis, we interrogate how race categories align (or not) with college students’ responses to ethnoracial identification questions. We examine the racial and ethnic categorization choices of 24,000 U.S. higher education students who participated in a survey administered at 21 colleges and universities across the country, focusing on the more than 1,300 students who chose to write-in an ethnoracial categorization in an open box. We find that students provide a wide range of ethnoracial categorizations when prompted with an open-ended instrument: ethnic/national identities, panethnic identities, resistance to categorization, unknown origins, and racially mixed identities. Some of these responses show students pushing back on racial categories by suggesting alternate ones. Other responses indicate students are rejecting racial categories in favor of a color-blind ideology. The response types provide a window not only into self-identity, but also into how students perceive the boundaries of ethnoracial groupings.

Our analyses show that college students are thinking about racial identity in a myriad of ways that are varied, complex, multiple and resistant to traditional survey categories. This is critical for practitioners to recognize, as how students are grouped and classified can create divisions or create categories that may not have previously been recognized (Brubaker, 2009). We encourage researchers to include an open-ended box for race collection because it reinforces how messy and imperfect racial categorization schema are. Allowing for more open-ended responses permits students to dictate their responses, while set identification schemas will impact the responses institutions get and limit what can be learned from them. Without including an open-ended box, institutions may implicitly suggest that the categories provided are exhaustive and sufficient and there is something wrong with the student who does not comply with them, reinforcing the structures of domination inherent in racial projects (Omi & Winant, 2014). This study has shown that many university students identify with unconventional ethnoracial categories and groupings. Allowing multiple ways of identifying supports the idea that such categories are mutable, socially constructed and complex.

Author

• Karly Ford, Pennsylvania State University
  Presenting Author