Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Questioning Identity: How A Diverse Set Of Respondents Answer Standard Questions About Ethnicity And Race, Dana Garbarski, Jennifer Dykema, Cameron P. Jones, Tiffany S. Neman, Nora Cate Schaeffer, Dorothy Farrar Edwards

Sociology: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Ethnoracial identity refers to the racial and ethnic categories that people use to classify themselves and others. How it is measured in surveys has implications for understanding inequalities. Yet how people self-identify may not conform to the categories standardized survey questions use to measure ethnicity and race, leading to potential measurement error. In interviewer-administered surveys, answers to survey questions are achieved through interviewer–respondent interaction. An analysis of interviewer–respondent interaction can illuminate whether, when, how, and why respondents experience problems with questions. In this study, we examine how indicators of interviewer–respondent interactional problems vary across ethnoracial groups when respondents answer questions …