Seminar Series: Seeing or Believing: 1st vs. 3rd Person Perspectives on Racial Identification

(joint talk with Sociology) "Seeing or Believing: 1st vs. 3rd Person Perspectives on Racial Identification" Race is most often conceptualized as a characteristic that defines populations based on shared physical appearance, but in social research, race is measured by self-reported identities, which are subject to political and cultural forces as well as personal preferences. Since external measures of race are not included in most observational data sets, the consequences of relying on self-reported data to determine the size and characteristics of race/ethnic sub-populations remain unexamined. This paper take steps to address these limitations by exploring findings from a recently collected, first-of-its-kind data set containing independent, third-person measures of ¿observed race¿ for nearly 10,000 high school seniors in Washington State.