That is a classic, but continuing dilemma: One, the basis of a person's identity (skin color, ethnic basis, national origin, their current perception of how they identify themselves, etc.)?; and Two, the implications of such measures.

You bring up a good point about Americans (North and South) as well as people from various African states, and likely other regions.  The question arises whether categories like skin color and ethnic basis or skin color and national origin are really divisible.  What about a person from the Masai tribe that was born and raised in Kenya?  Can one divide that person's ethnic, their skin color, and their national origin?  Given there are policy implications to these categories, this creates challenges.  If they're not divisible, as you show, then it's hard to count and thus hard to measure.  Until the US government included a mixed race category, the President-elect would be stuck between categories.

How accurate are the categories created?  Then, is any category under-reporting or over-reporting its weight?  Some work has been done to try and determine ethnicity through determining how a person identifies themself: do they see themself as White, European, French, Parisian, etc.  They use the "ethnic kin" the person tends to connect to, relying on religion, language, and (a more controversial one) community.

Interesting!  Steve Ackerman

[More]

I have heard a very interesting story about ethnic identity.

There was a woman who was going to apply US passport. She looked 100% white woman, and she also believe so. She filled out all the application form and turned in a passport agency. But the agent said, "excuse me mam, you made a mistake. You said you are White, but you are not. You are African American." She didn't understand it. Her parents are white, and she looked perfectly white. But the passport agents looked all her file and finally conclude she is not a white. The reason is this, her grand grand grand...(5)... mom was African American. So, US government classified her African American.

It was very old story, but I found one interesting thing about ethnic ID here. Last night, we saw a projection that Latio rate will go up, so US government need to do something for them, or spend more money for them.

I think the definition of Latio is very ambiguous. But when we say latino, who are latino? Does it mean only first generation of Hispanic people, or people who can speak spanish? Or, does it include the second who don't speak english and are Americanized already. Or, does it include third or fourth generations, one of their paretns are either, white or Asian. 

I know many second generations of Korean. They are very different from their parents and even me. They don't speak Korean, don't know about Korean cluture. What about third or fourth generation. There is no 100% third or fourth generation of Korean because mostly they are married with other ethnic group.

All americans are going to be mixed. How can we classify people with specific ethnic category? I think, Latios are mixed blood, like mulatto mestizo. They will be mixed more and more. But if someone tries to categorize US residents by ethnic group, I can say that there must be a hidden reason.

[More]

In the Johnson & Joslyn reading for Dr. Schroedel's lecture on the inductive process, the authors barely touched on post-behavioralism.  In it, they summarized the paradigm as having the following characteristics:

1.      Substance must precede technique.  They both go together, but if your situation demands that you have to pick between the two, go with substance.

2.      To sit and only describe and analyze facts it to hamper understanding; it is socially conservative.

3.      Behavior research must lose touch with reality

4.      Science can never be neutral.

5.      Members of a discipline bear the responsibility of all intellectuals

6.      To know is to bear the responsibility in acting.

7.      Politicization of the professions is inescapable as well as desirable.

 

Do you feel that this normative approach is a valid means of conducting social science research, by describing what 'ought to be' rather than just 'what is'?  At first glance, it appears to be taking our scientific endeavor into the wholly unscientific avenue of politics and philosophy.  If science truly is amoral, then the generation of knowledge remains in the scientific (Lakatosian) realm whereas what is actually done with the knowledge is in the legal / political / philosophical realm (Kuhnian).  Should the two be intermixed as post-behavioralism seems to imply?

 

I would appreciate your thoughts!

 

[More]

[More]

[More]

[More]

[More]

In this week’s readings, the logic about case studies was confusing.  The author wants to use statistics when it works for advancing the hypothesis, but now follow statistical rules. Such rules as “randomness” are not needed. This “cherry picking’ parts of discipline to advance the hypothesis that comes from the data seems to be suspect. 

[More]

I think this is IRB's goal.  It an institution that regulates and defines what research is and is not ok.  What do you think IRB's role is in this?

[More]

In one of the recommended for this week, we learned of the APA coming together to create a standard for statistical research for the psychology discipline. In the past weeks lecture, Prof Arbetman-Rabinowitz told us that her dream was to have a consensus on research definitions social sciences. This dream seems to be a hard one to produce. The question I raise is should the students at CGU come together to form a criteria for research that is acceptable for our small population. If we could formulate the parameters for our institution, this would give hope for the social sciences over all coming together.

[More]