Clancy Ratliff's report on the Proposals for the Responsible Use of Racial & Ethnic Categories in Biomedical Research: Where Do We Go From Here? conference took me back to when I used to work in health services research.
The following is an anecdote, but I hope a useful one. We had a famous foreign researcher being interviewed for the position of Director. One of the New Zealand researchers asked the candidate how they would incorporate Maori and Polynesian concerns into his research on the efficacy and efficiency of health services. After struggling for an answer he replied [and I paraphrase]
I would include an independent variable for that in a regression
This answer exemplied what Raj Bhopal has called "black box epidemiology." Race or ethnicity is thought to affect health status or the outcome of treatment, but the precise pathways are unknown. The [dummy] variables for racial categories are generally retained in the model because they have statistically significant co-efficients, even if their effect on the outcome may be trivial.
I wager that despite this flurry of well-researched articles telling us that race and ethnicity as conventionally used have little purchase on answering medical questions, we'll continue to see it.
At level of the lab or the office it's because researchers in a black box of their own see race as a convenient proxy for something else they can't measure that well, and may not even be sure of how to go about measuring.
But my foreigner-in-the-Antipodes anecdote suggests something else: politics.
In New Zealand there is a significant political constituency for funding research into Maori and Pacific Islander health issues. The particular way in which that works is unique to New Zealand, but race and ethnicity are a live element in political discourse around the world.
Self-identification may not be a way out of the conceptual morass for researchers, but as long as people see race as part of their own identity it will be a part of social research. Bio-medical research is conducted by social people, and is not immune from the social and political currents around it.
Posted by robe0419 at May 12, 2005 1:43 PM