Measuring Identity: A Guide for Social Scientists

by Edited by Rawi Abdelal , Yoshiko M. Herrera , Alastair Iain Johnston , Rose McDermott

• ISBN13: 9780521518185
• ISBN10: 0521518180
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-04-06
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The concept of identity has become increasingly prominent in the social sciences and humanities. Analysis of the development of social identities is an important focus of scholarly research, and scholars using social identities as the building blocks of social, political, and economic life have attempted to account for a number of discrete outcomes by treating identities as causal factors. The dominant implication of the vast literature on identity is that social identities are among the most important social facts of the world in which we live. Abdelal, Herrera, Johnston, and McDermott have brought together leading scholars from a variety of disciplines to consider the conceptual and methodological challenges associated with treating identity as a variable, offer a synthetic theoretical framework, and demonstrate the possibilities offered by various methods of measurement. The book represents a collection of empirically-grounded theoretical discussions of a range of methodological techniques for the study of identities.

Table of Contents

Contributors	p. vii
Introduction	p. 1
Definition, Conceptualization, and Measurement Alternatives
Identity as a Variable	p. 17
Conceptualizing and Measuring Ethnic Identity	p. 33
Trade-offs in Measuring Identities: A Comparison of Five Approaches	p. 72
Survey Methods
Between Social Theory and Social Science Practice: Toward a New Approach to the Survey Measurement of "Race"	p. 113
Balancing National and Ethnic Identities: The Psychology of E Pluribus Unum	p. 145
Black and Blue: Black Identity and Black Solidarity in an Era of Conservative Triumph	p. 175
Content Analysis and Cognitive Mapping
Quantitative Content Analysis and the Measurement of Collective Identity	p. 203
The Content and Intersection of Identity in Iraq	p. 237
A Constructivist Dataset on Ethnicity and Institutions	p. 250
Discourse Analysis and Ethnography
Identity Relations and the Sino-Soviet Split	p. 279
Techniques for Measuring Identity in Ethnographic Research	p. 316
Experiments
Psychological Approaches to Identity: Experimentation and Application	p. 345
Bibliography	p. 369
Index	p. 409
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