Aliya Saperstein
Biographic Data
| ID | 100979 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Aliya Saperstein |
| GIVEN NAMES | Aliya |
| FAMILY NAME | Saperstein |
| SIGNATURE | SAPERSTEIN A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stanford University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6429-1172 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1045 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
A Roadmap for Inequality Research: Transparency, Intersectionality, and Multiple Measures of Race
Most quantitative studies of U.S. inequality rely on single measures of race and do not transparently describe them. However, inconsistencies between measures can yield conclusions that differ both substantively and statistically. We ask: when faced with multiple ways to categorize respondents, how should researchers choose? We conduct intersectional analyses of five inequality outcomes, using the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which…
Normative Discrimination and the Gender Binary: Negative Evaluations of People with Nonconventional Pronouns
Pronoun sharing has become a common inclusion practice in U.S. schools and workplaces. Drawing on normative discrimination theories, however, we predict that pronoun sharing can lead to negative evaluations of people who share nonconventional pronouns. In a preregistered survey experiment (N = 1,516), participants rated a fictitious potential teammate whose name and pronouns were varied. Participants reported significantly less comfort working wi…
Formatting the two-step gender measure: Experimental insights from the United States
BACKGROUND: Measuring sex and gender is central to demographic research and studies of social inequality. Best-practice guidelines for surveying English-speaking adults recommend a two-step approach, which uses two items to distinguish sex at birth from current identity. Additional research is needed to understand whether specific formatting decisions affect response distributions or measures of data quality. OBJECTIVE: We explore three understud…
Chronic Disease and Aging-Related Risk Factors in Multiracial Subgroups: California, 2014–2023
You’re Supposed to Say White: Epistemic Ambiguity and Ethnoracial Classification
Quantitative analyses of inequality typically take ethnoracial classification for granted without considering how such data come to be. We argue that criteria for categorization is often unclear, creating ambiguity about who has the authority to determine an individuals’ race or ethnicity in the U.S. context. Using more than 300 survey interview transcripts from the UC Berkeley Social Networks Study (UCNets), we explore how respondents and survey…
Recognizing Identity Fluidity in Demographic Research
Standard demographic research has typically constrained the existence of identity fluidity, assuming that demographic categories such as race or ethnicity and sex or gender should be static across the life course and measuring them as such. However, recent research and changes in data collection practices highlight the limitations of this approach by demonstrating fluidity in both racial and gender identities that rivals levels of fluidity in oth…
Marginalized measures: The harmonization of diversity in precision medicine research
The production of large, shareable datasets is increasingly prioritized for a wide range of research purposes. In biomedicine, especially in the United States, calls to enhance representation of historically underrepresented populations in databases that integrate genomic, health history, demographic and lifestyle data have also increased in order to support the goals of precision medicine. Understanding the assumptions and values that shape the …
Racial classification as a multistate process
BACKGROUND: Although the existence of racial fluidity is generally accepted in both Brazil and the United States, changes in racial classification over the life course are often not incorporated into standard demographic estimates. OBJECTIVE: By taking a multistate perspective on the variability of racial classification, we can use demographic methods to ask new questions about the nature of racial fluidity, such as: How many years can someone cl…
Diversifying Gender Categories and the Sex/Gender System
The growing visibility of transgender and nonbinary people raises important sociological questions about how the structure of sex and gender is shifting and underscores necessary changes to research practice. We review what is known about emerging gender identities and their implications for sociological understandings of the relationship between sex and gender and the maintenance of the sex/gender system of inequality. Transgender and nonbinary …
Identification in Interaction: Racial Mirroring between Interviewers and Respondents
Previous research has established that people shift their identities situationally and may come to subconsciously mirror one another. We explore this phenomenon among survey interviewers in the 2004-2018 General Social Survey by drawing on repeated measures of racial identification collected after each interview. We find not only that interviewers self-identify differently over time but also that their response changes cannot be fully explained b…
The Social Construction of Age: Concepts and Measurement
Age as an individual characteristic is ubiquitous in social science research because it has important associations with numerous outcomes of interest. Yet age is rarely treated as a phenomenon that requires explanation or theoretical attention. To advance research in sociology and beyond, we bring together previously siloed literatures on the conceptualization and measurement of age. Our framework presents age as a system of inequality that can b…
Counting on Whiteness: Religion, race, ethnicity, and the politics of Jewish demography
American Jews have long been an anomaly for scholars concerned with understanding how they fit into extant social scientific or historical categories. Sometimes they seem best described as an ethnic group, other times as a religious one. This ambiguity has also vexed Jewish communal leaders whose desire to comprehend their communities has largely been underwritten by their intention to protect it. This intersection of sociological methods and sch…
Conflicting signals: Exploring the socioeconomic implications of gender discordant names
We investigate the educational and employment consequences of having a gender discordant name - one that is also given to people of a different gender. People with discordant names may be more likely to experience stigma due to the conflicting signal between their gender and the perceptions of femininity or masculinity associated with their names. Our primary measure of discordance is based on the percentage of men and women with each first name,…
Dangerous data: Seeing social surveys through the sexuality prism
Social surveys both reflect and shape beliefs about sexuality. Social norms construct the “authorized vocabulary” of surveys and the resulting data influence the research questions that can be answered and the policies likely to be inspired by study findings. Scholars have called for balancing attention to pleasure vs. danger and normative vs. non-normative practices in studies of sexuality as well as for collection of data on sexual desires, beh…
Regimes beyond the One-Drop Rule: New Models of Multiracial Identity
The racial classification of mixed-race people has often been presumed to follow hypo- or hyperdescent rules, where they were assigned to either their lower- or higher-status monoracial ancestor group. This simple framework, however, does not capture actual patterns of self-identification in contemporary societies with multiple racialized groups and numerous mixed-race combinations. Elaborating on previous concepts of multiracial classification r…
Consistent Divisions or Methodological Decisions? Assessing the U.S. Racial Hierarchy Across Outcomes
Strategies of inclusion: The tradeoffs of pursuing "baked in" diversity through place-based recruitment
US funding agencies have begun to institutionalize expectations that biomedical studies achieve defined thresholds for diversity among research participants, including in precision medicine research (PMR). In this paper, we examine how practices of recruitment have unfolded in the wake of these diversity mandates. We find that a very common approach to seeking diverse participants leverages understandings of spatial, geographic, and site diversit…
Reflecting Race and Status: The Dynamics of Material Hardship and How People Are Perceived
In most stratification research, race is treated as a static and one-dimensional individual characteristic, though a growing literature indicates dynamic and multidimensional measures better represent experiences of racial categorization and inequality. The authors leverage such measures to explore the relationship between material hardship and racial reflected appraisals, or how people report being perceived by others. Results from the New York …
Measuring Race and Ancestry in the Age of Genetic Testing
Will the rise of genetic ancestry tests (GATs) change how Americans respond to questions about race and ancestry on censuses and surveys? To provide an answer, we draw on a unique study of more than 100,000 U.S. adults that inquired about respondents' race, ancestry, and genealogical knowledge. We find that people in our sample who have taken a GAT, compared with those who have not, are more likely to self-identify as multiracial and are particul…
Gender, Generation, and Multiracial Identification in the United States
Multiracial self-identification is frequently portrayed as a disproportionately female tendency, but previous research has not probed the conditions under which this relationship might occur. Using the 2015 Pew Survey of Multiracial Adults, we offer a more comprehensive analysis that considers gender differences at two distinct stages: reporting multiple races in one's ancestry and selecting multiple races to describe oneself. We also examine sel…
Categorical and gradational: Alternative survey measures of sex and gender
Demands for recognition of gender diversity and transgender people are growing. We tested non-binary sex and gender measures using nationally representative samples of US adults to assess feasibility for general population surveys. We find more support for a two-step categorical approach, with separate questions about natal sex and gender identity, than for a single question assessing transgender status as the latter was less reliable within our …
Consumer (dis-)interest in genetic ancestry testing: The roles of race, immigration, and ancestral certainty
Genetic ancestry testing (GAT) is marketed as a way to make up for missing knowledge about one's ancestry. Previous research questions the GAT industry's ability to fulfill this promise in terms of the validity and reliability of test results. We instead explore the demand side of GAT, evaluating who is most and least likely to express interest in GAT. Using data from an original, nationwide survey of over 100,000 American adults, we find that GA…
Placing Racial Classification in Context
This article extends previous research on place-based patterns of racial categorization by linking it to sociological theory that posits subnational variation in cultural schemas and applying regression techniques that allow for spatial variation in model estimates. We use data from a U.S. restricted-use geocoded longitudinal survey to predict racial classification as a function of both individual and county characteristics. We first estimate nat…
Gender and Health: Beyond Binary Categorical Measurement
This study leverages multiple measures of gender from a US national online survey (N = 1,508) to better assess how gender is related to self-rated health. In contrast to research linking feminine behaviors with good health and masculine behaviors with poor health, we find that masculinity is associated with better self-rated health for cisgender men, whereas femininity is associated with better self-rated health for cisgender women. The patterns …
The Generational Locus of Multiraciality and Its Implications for Racial Self-Identification
Estimates of the size of the multiracial population in the United States depend on what prompts people to report multiple races on censuses and surveys. We use data from the 2015 Pew Survey of Multiracial Adults to explore how racial self-identification is shaped by the generational locus of an individual's multiracial ancestry-that is, the place in one's family tree where the earliest interracial union appears. We develop the theoretical rationa…
Racial Fluidity and Inequality in the United States
The authors link the literature on racial fluidity and inequality in the United States and offer new evidence of the reciprocal relationship between the two processes. Using two decades of longitudinal data from a national survey, they demonstrate that not only does an individual’s race change over time, it changes in response to myriad changes in social position, and the patterns are similar for both self-identification and classification by oth…
New Categories Are Not Enough: Rethinking the Measurement of Sex and Gender in Social Surveys
Recently, scholars and activists have turned their attention toward improving the measurement of sex and gender in survey research. The focus of this effort has been on including answer options beyond 'male' and 'female' to questions about the respondent's gender. This is an important step toward both reflecting the diversity of gendered lives and better aligning survey measurement practice with contemporary gender theory. However, our systematic…
Racial Formation in Perspective: Connecting Individuals, Institutions, and Power Relations
Over the past 25 years, since the publication of Omi & Winant's Racial Formation in the United States, the statement that race is socially constructed has become a truism in sociological circles. Yet many struggle to describe exactly what the claim means. This review brings together empirical literature on the social construction of race from different levels of analysis to highlight the variety of approaches to studying racial formation processe…
Scaling Up: Representing Gender Diversity in Survey Research
Survey measures of gender have been critiqued for failing to reflect the diversity of the population. Conventionally, respondents to national surveys are categorized as female or male. Calls for improvement have centered on adding additional categories, such as transgender. We propose that in addition to revising categorical gender measures, national surveys should incorporate gradational measures of femininity and masculinity to better reflect g…
Double-Checking the Race Box: Examining Inconsistency between Survey Measures of Observed and Self-Reported Race
Social constructivist theories of race suggest no two measures of race will capture the same information, but the degree of “error” this creates for quantitative research on inequality is unclear. Using unique data from the General Social Survey, I find observed and self-reported measures of race yield substantively different results when used to explain income inequality in the United States. This occurs because inconsistent racial classificatio…
The Race of a Criminal Record: How Incarceration Colors Racial Perceptions
In the United States, racial disparities in incarceration and their consequences are widely discussed and debated. Previous research suggests that perceptions of crime and the operations of the criminal justice system play an important role in shaping how Americans think about race. This study extends the conversation by exploring whether being incarcerated affects how individuals perceive their own race as well as how they are perceived by other…
Capturing complexity in the United States: Which Aspects of Race Matter and When
The experience of race in the United States is shaped by both self-identification and ascription. One aspect reflects personal history, ancestry, and socialization while the other draws largely on appearance. Yet, most data collection efforts treat the two aspects of race as interchangeable, assuming that the relationship between each and an individual's life chances will be the same. This study demonstrates that incorporating racial self-identif…
When white people report racial discrimination: The role of region, religion, and politics
The Generational Locus of Multiraciality and Its Implications for Racial Self-Identification
Estimates of the size of the multiracial population in the United States depend on what prompts people to report multiple races on censuses and surveys. We use data from the 2015 Pew Survey of Multiracial Adults to explore how racial self-identification is shaped by the generational locus of an individual's multiracial ancestry-that is, the place in one's family tree where the earliest interracial union appears. We develop the theoretical rationa…
Race, color, and income inequality across the Americas
Racial inequality in the U.S. is typically described in terms of stark categorical difference, as compared to the more gradational stratification based on skin color often said to prevail in parts of Latin America. However, nationally representative data w
Making the Most of Multiple Measures: Disentangling the Effects of Different Dimensions of Race in Survey Research
The majority of social science research uses a single measure of race when investigating racial inequality. However, a growing body of work demonstrates that race shapes the life chances of individuals in multiple ways, related not only to how people self-identify but also to how others perceive them. As multiple measures of race are increasingly collected and used in survey research, it becomes important to consider the best methods of leveragin…
Gender and Health: Beyond Binary Categorical Measurement
This study leverages multiple measures of gender from a US national online survey (N = 1,508) to better assess how gender is related to self-rated health. In contrast to research linking feminine behaviors with good health and masculine behaviors with poor health, we find that masculinity is associated with better self-rated health for cisgender men, whereas femininity is associated with better self-rated health for cisgender women. The patterns …
A “Mulatto Escape Hatch” in the United States? Examining Evidence of Racial and Social Mobility During the Jim Crow Era
Racial distinctions in the United States have long been characterized as uniquely rigid and governed by strict rules of descent, particularly along the black-white boundary. This is often contrasted with countries, such as Brazil, that recognize "mixed" or intermediate racial categories and allow for more fluidity or ambiguity in racial classification. Recently released longitudinal data from the IPUMS Linked Representative Samples, and the brief…
Engendering Racial Perceptions: An Intersectional Analysis of How Social Status Shapes Race
Intersectionality emphasizes that race, class, and gender distinctions are inextricably intertwined, but fully interrogating the co-constitution of these axes of stratification has proven difficult to implement in large-scale quantitative analyses. We address this gap by exploring gender differences in how social status shapes race in the United States. Building on previous research showing that changes in the racial classifications of others are…
Beyond the Looking Glass: Exploring Fluidity in Racial Self-Identification and Interviewer Classification
Research has demonstrated the fluidity of racial self-identification and interviewer classification, but how they influence each other over time has not been systematically explored using national, longitudinal data. A typical theoretical prediction, consistent with theories of a 'looking-glass self,' is that people calibrate their self-identification in accordance with how they are perceived by others. We examine the degree to which this and oth…
Disentangling the Effects of Racial Self-identification and Classification by Others: The Case of Arrest
Scholars of race have stressed the importance of thinking about race as a multidimensional construct, yet research on racial inequality does not routinely take this multidimensionality into account. We draw on data from the U.S. National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to disentangle the effects of self-identifying as black and being classified by others as black on subsequently being arrested. Results reveal that the odds of arrest are n…
Categorical and gradational: Alternative survey measures of sex and gender
Demands for recognition of gender diversity and transgender people are growing. We tested non-binary sex and gender measures using nationally representative samples of US adults to assess feasibility for general population surveys. We find more support for a two-step categorical approach, with separate questions about natal sex and gender identity, than for a single question assessing transgender status as the latter was less reliable within our …
The Social Construction of Age: Concepts and Measurement
Age as an individual characteristic is ubiquitous in social science research because it has important associations with numerous outcomes of interest. Yet age is rarely treated as a phenomenon that requires explanation or theoretical attention. To advance research in sociology and beyond, we bring together previously siloed literatures on the conceptualization and measurement of age. Our framework presents age as a system of inequality that can b…
Regimes beyond the One-Drop Rule: New Models of Multiracial Identity
The racial classification of mixed-race people has often been presumed to follow hypo- or hyperdescent rules, where they were assigned to either their lower- or higher-status monoracial ancestor group. This simple framework, however, does not capture actual patterns of self-identification in contemporary societies with multiple racialized groups and numerous mixed-race combinations. Elaborating on previous concepts of multiracial classification r…
The Criminal Justice System and the Racialization of Perceptions
Recent research on how contact with the criminal justice system shapes racial perceptions in the United States has shown that incarceration increases the likelihood that people are racially classified by others as black, and decreases the likelihood that they are classified as white. We extend this work, using longitudinal data with information on whether respondents have been arrested, convicted, or incarcerated, and details about their most rec…
Gender, Generation, and Multiracial Identification in the United States
Multiracial self-identification is frequently portrayed as a disproportionately female tendency, but previous research has not probed the conditions under which this relationship might occur. Using the 2015 Pew Survey of Multiracial Adults, we offer a more comprehensive analysis that considers gender differences at two distinct stages: reporting multiple races in one's ancestry and selecting multiple races to describe oneself. We also examine sel…
Diversifying Gender Categories and the Sex/Gender System
The growing visibility of transgender and nonbinary people raises important sociological questions about how the structure of sex and gender is shifting and underscores necessary changes to research practice. We review what is known about emerging gender identities and their implications for sociological understandings of the relationship between sex and gender and the maintenance of the sex/gender system of inequality. Transgender and nonbinary …
Placing Racial Classification in Context
This article extends previous research on place-based patterns of racial categorization by linking it to sociological theory that posits subnational variation in cultural schemas and applying regression techniques that allow for spatial variation in model estimates. We use data from a U.S. restricted-use geocoded longitudinal survey to predict racial classification as a function of both individual and county characteristics. We first estimate nat…
Counting on Whiteness: Religion, race, ethnicity, and the politics of Jewish demography
American Jews have long been an anomaly for scholars concerned with understanding how they fit into extant social scientific or historical categories. Sometimes they seem best described as an ethnic group, other times as a religious one. This ambiguity has also vexed Jewish communal leaders whose desire to comprehend their communities has largely been underwritten by their intention to protect it. This intersection of sociological methods and sch…
Still Searching for a True Race? Reply to Kramer et al. and Alba et al
Previous articleNext article FreeStill Searching for a True Race? Reply to Kramer et al. and Alba et al.1Aliya Saperstein and Andrew M. PennerAliya SapersteinStanford University Search for more articles by this author and Andrew M. PennerUniversity of California, Irvine Search for more articles by this author Corrections to this articleErratum for “Still Searching for a True Race? Reply to Kramer et al. and Alba et al.”PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to…
Double-Checking the Race Box: Examining Inconsistency between Survey Measures of Observed and Self-Reported Race
Social constructivist theories of race suggest no two measures of race will capture the same information, but the degree of “error” this creates for quantitative research on inequality is unclear. Using unique data from the General Social Survey, I find observed and self-reported measures of race yield substantively different results when used to explain income inequality in the United States. This occurs because inconsistent racial classificatio…
How social status shapes race
We show that racial perceptions are fluid; how individuals perceive their own race and how they are perceived by others depends in part on their social position. Using longitudinal data from a representative sample of Americans, we find that individuals who are unemployed, incarcerated, or impoverished are more likely to be seen and identify as black and less likely to be seen and identify as white, regardless of how they were classified or ident…
The Race of a Criminal Record: How Incarceration Colors Racial Perceptions
In the United States, racial disparities in incarceration and their consequences are widely discussed and debated. Previous research suggests that perceptions of crime and the operations of the criminal justice system play an important role in shaping how Americans think about race. This study extends the conversation by exploring whether being incarcerated affects how individuals perceive their own race as well as how they are perceived by other…
Looking the Part: Social Status Cues Shape Race Perception
It is commonly believed that race is perceived through another's facial features, such as skin color. In the present research, we demonstrate that cues to social status that often surround a face systematically change the perception of its race. Participants categorized the race of faces that varied along White-Black morph continua and that were presented with high-status or low-status attire. Low-status attire increased the likelihood of categor…
Racial Fluidity and Inequality in the United States
The authors link the literature on racial fluidity and inequality in the United States and offer new evidence of the reciprocal relationship between the two processes. Using two decades of longitudinal data from a national survey, they demonstrate that not only does an individual’s race change over time, it changes in response to myriad changes in social position, and the patterns are similar for both self-identification and classification by oth…
Capturing complexity in the United States: Which Aspects of Race Matter and When
The experience of race in the United States is shaped by both self-identification and ascription. One aspect reflects personal history, ancestry, and socialization while the other draws largely on appearance. Yet, most data collection efforts treat the two aspects of race as interchangeable, assuming that the relationship between each and an individual's life chances will be the same. This study demonstrates that incorporating racial self-identif…
A “Mulatto Escape Hatch” in the United States? Examining Evidence of Racial and Social Mobility During the Jim Crow Era
Racial distinctions in the United States have long been characterized as uniquely rigid and governed by strict rules of descent, particularly along the black-white boundary. This is often contrasted with countries, such as Brazil, that recognize "mixed" or intermediate racial categories and allow for more fluidity or ambiguity in racial classification. Recently released longitudinal data from the IPUMS Linked Representative Samples, and the brief…
Engendering Racial Perceptions: An Intersectional Analysis of How Social Status Shapes Race
Intersectionality emphasizes that race, class, and gender distinctions are inextricably intertwined, but fully interrogating the co-constitution of these axes of stratification has proven difficult to implement in large-scale quantitative analyses. We address this gap by exploring gender differences in how social status shapes race in the United States. Building on previous research showing that changes in the racial classifications of others are…
Racial Formation in Perspective: Connecting Individuals, Institutions, and Power Relations
Over the past 25 years, since the publication of Omi & Winant's Racial Formation in the United States, the statement that race is socially constructed has become a truism in sociological circles. Yet many struggle to describe exactly what the claim means. This review brings together empirical literature on the social construction of race from different levels of analysis to highlight the variety of approaches to studying racial formation processe…
When white people report racial discrimination: The role of region, religion, and politics
The Criminal Justice System and the Racialization of Perceptions
Recent research on how contact with the criminal justice system shapes racial perceptions in the United States has shown that incarceration increases the likelihood that people are racially classified by others as black, and decreases the likelihood that they are classified as white. We extend this work, using longitudinal data with information on whether respondents have been arrested, convicted, or incarcerated, and details about their most rec…
Race, color, and income inequality across the Americas
Racial inequality in the U.S. is typically described in terms of stark categorical difference, as compared to the more gradational stratification based on skin color often said to prevail in parts of Latin America. However, nationally representative data w
Beyond the Looking Glass: Exploring Fluidity in Racial Self-Identification and Interviewer Classification
Research has demonstrated the fluidity of racial self-identification and interviewer classification, but how they influence each other over time has not been systematically explored using national, longitudinal data. A typical theoretical prediction, consistent with theories of a 'looking-glass self,' is that people calibrate their self-identification in accordance with how they are perceived by others. We examine the degree to which this and oth…
Disentangling the Effects of Racial Self-identification and Classification by Others: The Case of Arrest
Scholars of race have stressed the importance of thinking about race as a multidimensional construct, yet research on racial inequality does not routinely take this multidimensionality into account. We draw on data from the U.S. National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to disentangle the effects of self-identifying as black and being classified by others as black on subsequently being arrested. Results reveal that the odds of arrest are n…
New Categories Are Not Enough: Rethinking the Measurement of Sex and Gender in Social Surveys
Recently, scholars and activists have turned their attention toward improving the measurement of sex and gender in survey research. The focus of this effort has been on including answer options beyond 'male' and 'female' to questions about the respondent's gender. This is an important step toward both reflecting the diversity of gendered lives and better aligning survey measurement practice with contemporary gender theory. However, our systematic…
Still Searching for a True Race? Reply to Kramer et al. and Alba et al
Previous articleNext article FreeStill Searching for a True Race? Reply to Kramer et al. and Alba et al.1Aliya Saperstein and Andrew M. PennerAliya SapersteinStanford University Search for more articles by this author and Andrew M. PennerUniversity of California, Irvine Search for more articles by this author Corrections to this articleErratum for “Still Searching for a True Race? Reply to Kramer et al. and Alba et al.”PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to…
Making the Most of Multiple Measures: Disentangling the Effects of Different Dimensions of Race in Survey Research
The majority of social science research uses a single measure of race when investigating racial inequality. However, a growing body of work demonstrates that race shapes the life chances of individuals in multiple ways, related not only to how people self-identify but also to how others perceive them. As multiple measures of race are increasingly collected and used in survey research, it becomes important to consider the best methods of leveragin…
Scaling Up: Representing Gender Diversity in Survey Research
Survey measures of gender have been critiqued for failing to reflect the diversity of the population. Conventionally, respondents to national surveys are categorized as female or male. Calls for improvement have centered on adding additional categories, such as transgender. We propose that in addition to revising categorical gender measures, national surveys should incorporate gradational measures of femininity and masculinity to better reflect g…
The Generational Locus of Multiraciality and Its Implications for Racial Self-Identification
Estimates of the size of the multiracial population in the United States depend on what prompts people to report multiple races on censuses and surveys. We use data from the 2015 Pew Survey of Multiracial Adults to explore how racial self-identification is shaped by the generational locus of an individual's multiracial ancestry-that is, the place in one's family tree where the earliest interracial union appears. We develop the theoretical rationa…
Consumer (dis-)interest in genetic ancestry testing: The roles of race, immigration, and ancestral certainty
Genetic ancestry testing (GAT) is marketed as a way to make up for missing knowledge about one's ancestry. Previous research questions the GAT industry's ability to fulfill this promise in terms of the validity and reliability of test results. We instead explore the demand side of GAT, evaluating who is most and least likely to express interest in GAT. Using data from an original, nationwide survey of over 100,000 American adults, we find that GA…
Placing Racial Classification in Context
This article extends previous research on place-based patterns of racial categorization by linking it to sociological theory that posits subnational variation in cultural schemas and applying regression techniques that allow for spatial variation in model estimates. We use data from a U.S. restricted-use geocoded longitudinal survey to predict racial classification as a function of both individual and county characteristics. We first estimate nat…
Gender and Health: Beyond Binary Categorical Measurement
This study leverages multiple measures of gender from a US national online survey (N = 1,508) to better assess how gender is related to self-rated health. In contrast to research linking feminine behaviors with good health and masculine behaviors with poor health, we find that masculinity is associated with better self-rated health for cisgender men, whereas femininity is associated with better self-rated health for cisgender women. The patterns …
Categorical and gradational: Alternative survey measures of sex and gender
Demands for recognition of gender diversity and transgender people are growing. We tested non-binary sex and gender measures using nationally representative samples of US adults to assess feasibility for general population surveys. We find more support for a two-step categorical approach, with separate questions about natal sex and gender identity, than for a single question assessing transgender status as the latter was less reliable within our …
Measuring Race and Ancestry in the Age of Genetic Testing
Will the rise of genetic ancestry tests (GATs) change how Americans respond to questions about race and ancestry on censuses and surveys? To provide an answer, we draw on a unique study of more than 100,000 U.S. adults that inquired about respondents' race, ancestry, and genealogical knowledge. We find that people in our sample who have taken a GAT, compared with those who have not, are more likely to self-identify as multiracial and are particul…
Gender, Generation, and Multiracial Identification in the United States
Multiracial self-identification is frequently portrayed as a disproportionately female tendency, but previous research has not probed the conditions under which this relationship might occur. Using the 2015 Pew Survey of Multiracial Adults, we offer a more comprehensive analysis that considers gender differences at two distinct stages: reporting multiple races in one's ancestry and selecting multiple races to describe oneself. We also examine sel…
Sociology (32 works) · Psychology (26 works) · Gender Studies (23 works) · Racial and Ethnic Identity Research (22 works) · Social Psychology (19 works) · Political science (14 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · Race (biology (13 works) · Demography (12 works) · Inequality (11 works)