Studying Ethnic Identity: Methodological and Conceptual Approaches Across Disciplines

Humans are a fundamentally social species. As individuals, we construct our identity through our affiliation, interaction, and identification with larger groups. And in diverse and multiethnic societies like ours, ethnic identity takes on an especially profound importance. In recent years, social scientists have been increasingly studying the meaning, process, and content of ethnic identity, but these efforts have been piecemeal, and the field as a whole has suffered from a lack of conceptual clarity and methodological rigor.

In this book, editors Carlos Santos and Adriana Umaña-Taylor bring together a diverse group of social and applied scientists from a wide range of fields including educational anthropology, developmental, community and social psychology, and sociology. Together, they investigate the process by which ethnic identity is formed and maintained throughout the lifespan. Authors present qualitative and quantitative approaches to conceptualizing and measuring ethnic identity, including narrative psychology and ethnographic approaches, cognitive schemas and semi-structured interviews, as well as analyses of social networks. Throughout, authors present contextually-rich accounts of ethnic identity that keep the focus where it belongs, on the lived experience of real people.