The Measurement of Race and Ethnicity in the Censuses of Australia, Canada, and the United States: Parallels, Paradoxes, and Progressions

• Activity Number: 421
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 3, 2010 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Social Statistics Section
• Author(s): Gillian Stevens and Hiromi Ishizawa*+ and Douglas Grbic
• Companies: University of Alberta and The George Washington University and Association of American Medical Colleges
• Keywords: census ; measurement ; race ; ethnicity

Abstract

Most national censuses include questions about race, colour, national origins, ethnicity, ancestry, or tribe in an effort to describe subgroups within their population. In this paper, we focus on changes over the last half century in the racial and ethnic classification schemes in the censuses of three countries, Australia, Canada, and the United States, that share important historical and demographic features. We show that there are similarities, as well as some idiosyncratic features, in how these three nations define and describe racial and ethnic subgroups. We then argue that the gathering of data on the racial/ethnic subgroups in these three nations has followed a similar progression over the last half century because of shifts in the understanding of race, data-gathering procedures and the ongoing conversation between each national population and its data-gathering institution.