Measuring Ethnic Inequalities

Sorry to have been silent for the last few days, I’ll fill in later today or this week. Anyway folks, before people pack up for the holidays here’s a very useful research note from sociologists at the University of Surrey’s Social Research Unit.

Amongst other things the researchers point out that:

ethnic categories are fluid and context specific

the fluidity of categories makes it hard to make comparisons over time

Census categories such as ‘Black African’ - can in practice be used to describe people with widely differing national origins, language, and religions.

Researchers need to be wary of ‘over-researching’ particular ethnic groups leading to ‘fatigue’. People can get irritated by excessive researcher interest. This can make the community/group unwilling to cooperate, feeling as if they are ‘lab rats’ or similar.