1/24/2024 0 Comments Social status![]() ![]() The researchers draw a comparison with our health. ![]() They see race not as a fixed entity that is purely determined from birth, but a flexible one, settled by a tug-of-war between different possible classifications.īiological traits like skin colour obviously have a strong pull, but they aren’t alone – changes in social position can also affect how people see themselves and are seen by others. To Penner and Saperstein, the study contradicts the idea that races, and the differences between them, are dominated by biological differences between groups of people. The graphs above follow the same pattern as the previous ones these refer to the interviewees’ own racial identity.Īll of these changes were statistically significant, and are even more pertinent in the aftermath of the recent US elections, when many galling debates centred on whether Barack Obama was truly black, given his mixed parentage and his social success. For example, among people described as white in one year, 96% of those who remained outside prison were placed in the same category a year later, but only 90% of those who had been incarcerated were still described as white. People who were classified as white in one year were significantly less likely to be seen in the same way if they had lost their jobs, been sent to prison, or seen their household incomes dip below the poverty line. The duo found that these changes were related to social status. And for some people, their race, as noted on the survey forms, either shifted dramatically at one particular point or fluctuated between the different options. But Penner and Saperstein found that the error rate for another trait – gender – was only 0.27%, suggesting that errors in recording only played a very small part in explaining this trend. It’s possible that some of these cases were just due to mistakes on the part of the people filling out the forms, and indeed, some records showed a single anomalous year that didn’t match the rest. Over the 19 years of the survey, the race of about one in five people had changed at least once in the eyes of their interviewers. The results were surprising, especially for a country like the US, which apparently has very rigid racial boundaries. Every time, the interviewers classified each person as “White”, “Black” or “Other” and in both 19, the people themselves were asked to describe their “origin or descent” or which “race or races they considered themselves to be”. The sample were followed once a year until 1993 and every two years thereafter. Penner and Saperstein used data from a study called the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which began in 1979 by interviewing a group of about 12,000 Americans aged 14 to 22. Their study strongly argues that race is as much a flexible indicator of our social standing as it is a reflection of our biology. Unauthorized use is prohibited.īy following a group of people over almost two decades, Andrew Penner and Aliya Saperstein from the University of California, Irvine found that the way people identify themselves racially, and the way others define them, change over time and are coloured by social status.
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