Race/Ethnicity: Operational Definitions?

A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education highlights the research of Inkelas, Soldner, and Szelenyi. They tested three approaches other researchers use to classify race or ethnicity.

The three approaches tested were:

• Classify as biracial or multiracial
• Classify multiracial persons as the least common of categories selected
• Classify according to OMB categories

Their findings indicated that how researchers classified race or ethnicity could profoundly affect the results.

To us, this type of classification is an example of the importance of the operational definition. Recall our discussion of operational definitions on pp. 95-97 in chapter 4. On page 97, we write:

• In the Know: Perhaps the most important step you can take if you want to move from confusion to confidence about a scientific topic is to find out how the concepts are measured. Knowing how schizophrenia, intelligence, or subjective well-being is measured gives you a big boost toward understanding the topic.

To that, we add that race and ethnicity are not easy to operationally define. Thus, one should be very cautious when comparing studies on those variables. Be sure YOU know what operational definitions the authors are using for race and gender.