Essay on Ethnicity and Ethnic Diversity

Ethnicity was a means of categorizing human beings, that had widespread credibility and positive affirmation. From ‘ethnic’ food to ‘ethnic’ fashion the idea of ethnicity has been employed as a positive phenomenon in contemporary life but more importantly, as post-colonial nation-states have defined their distinctive identities, ethnicity has been frequently invoked as a primordial basis for nation-building (Downing, & Husband, 2005). Within established political formations, ethnic diversity has been increasingly politicized as human rights movements have, over the last four decades, fed into the dynamics of the politics of identity, the contemporary world ethnicity is not merely one of a plethora of available means of self-categorization and group formation, but it is one of the most salient systems of categorization in contemporary usage (Downing, & Husband, 2005). Pan, C. X., Glynn, Mogun, Choodnovskiy, & Avorn, (1999) state that the terms “ethnicity” and “race” are often interchangeable, but they refer to different demographic attributes, ethnicity refers to a shared cultural identity.

Ethnicity is defined by Downing, & Husband, (2005) as both a property of self-identification, a route to self-affirmation, and a collective phenomenon grounded in the interaction and political mobilization of the group: the ethnic group. Eriksen (1992) states that scholarly literature of ethnicity has been accounted for through two main kinds of theories. One is that ‘instrumentalist’ theories of ethnicity in regard to it as chiefly a kind of political organization and on the other hand, ‘primordialism’ theories stress ethnicity as a historical continuity of the ethnic community as the determining factor for personal identity (Eriksen, 1992). (Eriksen, 1992) stats that members of ethnic groups stress common descent; for example, the shared myth of origin, and ideology of endogamy such as, one is expected not to marry outside the group and ethnicity may be created from the inside, through a group’s insistence of its uniqueness and distinctive origin, or from the outside, through consistent labeling and often discriminatory practices from dominant peoples, we see that (a) ethnicity as a result of contact, not of isolation, (b) ethnicity is neither natural, eternal nor unambiguous in character, and, significantly, (c) ethnicity is dynamic. Ethnicity is relational and processual: it is not a “thing”, but an aspect of a social process (Downing, & Husband, 2005).

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Measuring

Many measures of ethnic diversity, most prominently the ethnolinguistic fractionalization (ELF) index rely most heavily on this assumption; and indeed, a number of studies have linked ELF to negative outcomes that are then attributed to ethnic diversity (the prototypical example being Easterly and Levine, 1997). (Marquardt & Herrera, 2015) On the other hand, say researchers who have analyzed data sets that only include groups with a theoretical link to conflict (i.e., the products of the Minorities at Risk [MAR] and Ethnic Power Relations [EPR] teams) have found a relationship among ethnicity, ethnic diversity, and conflict (Marquardt & Herrera, 2015). However, this strategy for measuring ethnic diversity—focusing only on those groups the authors consider politically relevant—brings up issues of selection bias and endogeneity, as well as concept validity and replicability (Marquardt & Herrera, 2015). Including only groups connected to the conflict in such data sets risks finding spurious correlations between ethnicity and conflict and using different conceptualizations and measurements of ethnicity leads to very different lists of “ethnic” groups and makes it difficult to know whether “ethnicity” per se a relevant variable (Marquardt & Herrera, 2015). Marquardt & Herrera, (2015) measured ethnicity in several ways by inclusion boundaries, enumerating groups, the uses of data enumerating groups choosing the level of analysis, diversity: fractionalization and polarization, grievances and mechanisms, grievances-based data sets, ethnic groups and grievances, intragroup variation and trait-based discrimination, they attempted to illustrate both the advancements in ethnicity research and but there are many issues that remain to be unaddressed.

On the other hand, Winker (2004) states that ethnicity is deceptively easy to measure and used ubiquitously in the biomedical literature, but yet slippery to pinpoint as definitive individual characteristics. Given the changing nature of the field, the most important directive for researchers is to report fully what they have done to make the process transparent to others valid comparisons can be drawn across studies such as “variables of ethnicity, should define how they measured the variables and justify their relevance” to make them even more explicit when reporting ethnicity, it should describe who designated ethnicity for an individual; self-designation generally is preferred, should indicate whether the options for designation were closed or open if the options were closed, authors are asked to provide what the options were, whether categories were combined, and, if so, how? If open-ended, if options allow for more individually accurate description, and finally, to indicate why ethnicity is believed to be relevant to the particular study, because “analysis by ethnicity has become a knee jerk reflex, accompanying every table that examines demographic differences, such as age and sex (Winker, 2004). Next, the relevance of ethnicity in the study, should be based on past literature or authors’ hypotheses, to facilitate the critical evaluation of race and ethnicity as constructs within the study of ethnicity, used as a proxy measure for other more difficult-to-measure variables, the rationale for doing so should be stated, this attempt to measure as many variables as possible directly, such as socioeconomic status, education, urban vs rural location, or income region by ZIP code, allowing researchers to sort out whether an outcome is truly related to ethnicity (as defined in the study) or to other factors with a closer relationship to the causal pathway (Winker, 2004).