Ethnicizing sexuality: an analysis of research practices in the Netherlands

Ethnicity is a frequently used measure in research into youth and sexuality in the Netherlands, a country known and admired for its favourable sexual health outcomes. This paper critically examines the production of knowledge about sexuality and ethnicity in the Netherlands. It traces the concept of ethnicity through four research practices (rationales of taking up ethnicity and compiling research populations; determining ethnicity; statistical calculations and making recommendations). It shows how the notion of ethnicity is flexible, slippery and changeable, yet at the same time becomes solidified and naturalized in relation to sexuality. The paper is based on a literature review of youth and sexuality in the Netherlands.     

Using Penalized Splines to Model Age‐ and Season‐of‐Birth‐Dependent Effects of Childhood Mortality Risk Factors in Rural Burkina Faso

Several previous studies have identified risk factors for childhood mortality in high risk areas, such as Sub‐Saharan Africa. Among these are lifestyle factors related for example to nutrition or sanitation. Other factors are related to social class, ethnicity and poverty in general. Few studies have investigated a dependence of these factors by age and season of birth which is the focus in this study. We perform a survival analysis of 9121 children born between 1998 and 2001 in a rural area of western Burkina Faso. The whole population is under demographic surveillance since 1993. All cause mortality is used as the endpoint and follow‐up information until the age of five years is available. Recently developed spline regression methods are used for the analysis. Ethnic group, religion, age of mother, twin status, sex, and distance to next health center are used as covariates all of which having a clear effect on survival in standard Cox regression analysis. With penalized spline regression, a more detailed risk pattern is observed. Ethnicity is more related to death at early age, as well as age of mother. The effect of the risk factors considered also appear to be related with season of birth (© 2009 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)     

Race, Ethnicity, and Racism in Medical Anthropology, 1977–2002

Researchers across the health sciences are engaged in a vigorous debate over the role that the concepts of "race" and "ethnicity" play in health research and clinical practice. Here we contribute to that debate by examining how the concepts of race, ethnicity, and racism are used in medical–anthropological research. We present a content analysis of Medical Anthropology and Medical Anthropology Quarterly , based on a systematic random sample of empirical research articles ( n = 283) published in these journals from 1977 to 2002. We identify both differences and similarities in the use of race, ethnicity, and racism concepts in medical anthropology and neighboring disciplines, and we offer recommendations for ways that medical anthropologists can contribute to the broader debate over racial and ethnic inequalities in health.     

Race, ethnicity, and racism in medical anthropology, 1977-2002

Researchers across the health sciences are engaged in a vigorous debate over the role that the concepts of "race" and "ethnicity" play in health research and clinical practice. Here we contribute to that debate by examining how the concepts of race, ethnicity, and racism are used in medical-anthropological research. We present a content analysis of Medical Anthropology and Medical Anthropology Quarterly, based on a systematic random sample of empirical research articles (n = 283) published in these journals from 1977 to 2002. We identify both differences and similarities in the use of race, ethnicity, and racism concepts in medical anthropology and neighboring disciplines, and we offer recommendations for ways that medical anthropologists can contribute to the broader debate over racial and ethnic inequalities in health.     

Investigating the Relationship between Ethnic Consciousness,Racial Discrimination and Self-Rated Health in New Zealand

In this study, we examine race/ethnic consciousness and its associations with experiences of racial discrimination and health in New Zealand. Racism is an important determinant of health and cause of ethnic inequities. However, conceptualising the mechanisms by which racism impacts on health requires racism to be contextualised within the broader social environment. Race/ethnic consciousness (how often people think about their race or ethnicity) is understood as part of a broader assessment of the ‘racial climate’. Higher race/ethnic consciousness has been demonstrated among non-dominant racial/ethnic groups and linked to adverse health outcomes in a limited number of studies. We analysed data from the 2006/07 New Zealand Health Survey, a national population-based survey of New Zealand adults, to examine the distribution of ethnic consciousness by ethnicity, and its association with individual experiences of racial discrimination and self-rated health. Findings showed that European respondents were least likely to report thinking about their ethnicity, with people from non-European ethnic groupings all reporting relatively higher ethnic consciousness. Higher ethnic consciousness was associated with an increased likelihood of reporting experience of racial discrimination for all ethnic groupings and was also associated with fair/poor self-rated health after adjusting for age, sex and ethnicity. However, this difference in health was no longer evident after further adjustment for socioeconomic position and individual experience of racial discrimination. Our study suggests different experiences of racialised social environments by ethnicity in New Zealand and that, at an individual level, ethnic consciousness is related to experiences of racial discrimination. However, the relationship with health is less clear and needs further investigation with research to better understand the racialised social relations that create and maintain ethnic inequities in health in attempts to better address the impacts of racism on health.     

Twinning and birth weight in the Israeli Jewish versus Muslim maternities.

Ethnicity differences account for genetic, environmental, lifestyle, and reproductive variables, influencing the rate of twinning (Nylander, 1981). Frequently, ethnic differences correlate with variable perinatal care leading to differences in outcome. Free access to antenatal care, and to facilities for delivery and neonatal care is available for the entire population in Israel, and therefore differences attributed to levels of medical care are practically negligible. We previously evaluated the overall relationship between ethnicity and outcome in a population-based cohort of mothers of twins (Goldman et al., 2001). However, the overall comparison may have masked some differences that could be present. The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether ethnicity is associated with differences in perinatal outcome in randomly selected, matched-controlled Israeli Jewish and Muslim mothers of twins.     

Is research into ethnicity and health racist,unsound, or important science?

Much historical research on race, intelligence, and health was racist, unethical, and ineffective. The concepts of race and ethnicity are difficult to define but continue to be applied to the study of the health of immigrant and ethnic minority groups in the hope of advancing understanding of causes of disease. While a morass of associations has been generated, race and ethnicity in health research have seldom given fundamental new understanding of disease. Most such research is "black box epidemiology." Researchers have not overcome the many conceptual and technical problems of research into ethnicity and health. By emphasising the negative aspects of the health of ethnic minority groups, research may have damaged their social standing and deflected attention from their health priorities. Unless researchers recognise the difficulties with research into ethnicity and health and correct its weaknesses, 20th century research in this subject may suffer the same ignominious fate as that of race science in the 19th century.     

Excavating Culture: Disentangling Ethnic Differences From Contextual Influences in Parenting

Historically, much of the research on parenting has not disentangled the influences of race/ethnicity, SES, and culture on family functioning and the development of children and adolescents. This special issue addresses this gap by disentangling ethnic differences in parenting behaviors from their contextual influences, thereby deepening our understanding of parenting processes in diverse families. Six members of the Parenting Section of the Study Group on Race, Culture, and Ethnicity (SGRCE) introduce and implement a novel approach toward understanding this question. The goal of this project is to study culturally related processes and the degree to which they predict parenting. An iterative process was employed to delineate the main parenting constructs (warmth, psychological and behavioral control, monitoring, communication, and self-efficacy), cultural processes, and contextual influences, and to coordinate a data analytic plan utilizing individual datasets with diverse samples to answer the research questions.     

Toward a Reconstitution of Ethnicity: Capitalist Expansion and Cultural Dynamics in Sudan

In this article I argue that, despite recent advances in anthropology, prevailing images of ethnicity in academic discourse overemphasize units at the expense of interconnections and tend toward ahistorical formalism. Through an examination of the dynamics of ethnic segmentation of the agricultural labor force in Sudan in this century, I seek to show that both the modem character of ethnicity as an organizing principle and the content of particular ethnic identities in Sudan emerged in the process of peripheral capitalist development. Ethnicity in these circumstances is thus fundamentally different from the ethnicity of the Sudanese past and from ethnic principles articulated elsewhere under different social conditions.     

The role of the state in the transformation of the nationalist movements of the 1960s: Comparing Wales and Quebec

This article examines the dynamics of ethnicity in Nigeria. It argues that ethnic debates and disputes are not just about the possession of power but also about the morality of power and the empowerment of civil society. Ethnicity is represented as the quest for dominance and the voice of civil society and accountability. The acute mistrusts and fears that condition ethnic conflict are analysed in the context of these rival visions of ethnicity as dominance and resistance.     

Sociologists,Archbishops, and ‘making a verb of a noun’

ABSTRACT

Contemporary discussion about race has a tendency to set off out without first checking the rear view mirror. In Theories of Race and Ethnicity: Contemporary Debates and Perspectives, in contrast, Murji and Solomos identify what has and has not been covered, and so appeal at the outset for a ‘more sustained’ account of changing research agendas of race and ethnic relations. Taken as a whole, the collection allows the editors to contemplate ‘what factors explain the mobilizing power of ideas about race and ethnicity in the contemporary environment?' and whether indeed ‘it is the “real” rather than race that should be placed in quotation marks’.     

Anthropological insights into the use of race/ethnicity to explore genetic contributions to disparities in health

Anthropological insights into the use of race/ethnicity to explore genetic contributions to disparities in health were developed using in-depth qualitative interviews with editorial staff from nineteen genetics journals, focusing on the methodological and conceptual mechanisms required to make race/ethnicity a genetic variable. As such, these analyses explore how and why race/ethnicity comes to be used in the context of genetic research, set against the background of continuing critiques from anthropology and related human sciences that focus on the social construction, structural correlates and limited genetic validity of racial/ethnic categories. The analyses demonstrate how these critiques have failed to engage geneticists, and how geneticists use a range of essentially cultural devices to protect and separate their use of race/ethnicity as a genetic construct from its use as a societal and social science resource. Given its multidisciplinary, biosocial nature and the cultural gaze of its ethnographic methodologies, anthropology is well placed to explore the cultural separation of science and society, and of natural and social science disciplines. Anthropological insights into the use of race/ethnicity to explore disparities in health suggest that moving beyond genetic explanations of innate difference might benefit from a more even-handed critique of how both the natural and social sciences tend to essentialize selective elements of race/ethnicity. Drawing on the example of HIV/AIDS, this paper demonstrates how public health has been undermined by the use of race/ethnicity as an analytical variable, both as a cipher for innate genetic differences in susceptibility and response to treatment, and in its use to identify 'core groups' at greater risk of becoming infected and infecting others. Clearly, a tendency for biological reductionism can place many biomedical issues beyond the scope of public health interventions, while socio-cultural essentialization has tended to stigmatize 'unhealthy behaviours' and the communities where these are more prevalent.     

Does Mortality Vary between Asian Subgroups in New Zealand: An Application of Hierarchical Bayesian Modelling

The aim of this paper was to see whether all-cause and cause-specific mortality rates vary between Asian ethnic subgroups, and whether overseas born Asian subgroup mortality rate ratios varied by nativity and duration of residence. We used hierarchical Bayesian methods to allow for sparse data in the analysis of linked census-mortality data for 25–75 year old New Zealanders. We found directly standardised posterior all-cause and cardiovascular mortality rates were highest for the Indian ethnic group, significantly so when compared with those of Chinese ethnicity. In contrast, cancer mortality rates were lowest for ethnic Indians. Asian overseas born subgroups have about 70% of the mortality rate of their New Zealand born Asian counterparts, a result that showed little variation by Asian subgroup or cause of death. Within the overseas born population, all-cause mortality rates for migrants living 0–9 years in New Zealand were about 60% of the mortality rate of those living more than 25 years in New Zealand regardless of ethnicity. The corresponding figure for cardiovascular mortality rates was 50%. However, while Chinese cancer mortality rates increased with duration of residence, Indian and Other Asian cancer mortality rates did not. Future research on the mechanisms of worsening of health with increased time spent in the host country is required to improve the understanding of the process, and would assist the policy-makers and health planners.     

Statistical resolution of ambiguous HLA typing data

High-resolution HLA typing plays a central role in many areas of immunology, such as in identifying immunogenetic risk factors for disease, in studying how the genomes of pathogens evolve in response to immune selection pressures, and also in vaccine design, where identification of HLA-restricted epitopes may be used to guide the selection of vaccine immunogens. Perhaps one of the most immediate applications is in direct medical decisions concerning the matching of stem cell transplant donors to unrelated recipients. However, high-resolution HLA typing is frequently unavailable due to its high cost or the inability to re-type historical data. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate a method for statistical, in silico refinement of ambiguous and/or low-resolution HLA data. Our method, which requires an independent, high-resolution training data set drawn from the same population as the data to be refined, uses linkage disequilibrium in HLA haplotypes as well as four-digit allele frequency data to probabilistically refine HLA typings. Central to our approach is the use of haplotype inference. We introduce new methodology to this area, improving upon the Expectation-Maximization (EM)-based approaches currently used within the HLA community. Our improvements are achieved by using a parsimonious parameterization for haplotype distributions and by smoothing the maximum likelihood (ML) solution. These improvements make it possible to scale the refinement to a larger number of alleles and loci in a more computationally efficient and stable manner. We also show how to augment our method in order to incorporate ethnicity information (as HLA allele distributions vary widely according to race/ethnicity as well as geographic area), and demonstrate the potential utility of this experimentally. A tool based on our approach is freely available for research purposes at http://microsoft.com/science.     

Body size satisfaction and physical activity levels among men and women

Body size satisfaction may be an important factor associated with physical activity. We analyzed data from the 2002 National Physical Activity and Weight Loss Survey (NPAWLS), a population-based cross-sectional telephone survey of US adults. Multiple logistic regression models were used to examine the association of body size satisfaction on being regularly active. Participants were aged > or =18 years with complete data on weight, race/ethnicity, physical activity level, and body size satisfaction (n = 10,021). More than half of men (55.8%) and women (53.3%) who reported being very satisfied with the body size were regularly active. After adjustment for covariates, participants who reported being somewhat or not satisfied with their body size had a 13 and 44% lower odds of being regularly active, respectively, compared with those very satisfied with their body size. When stratified by race/ethnicity, this association remained in whites (P for trend <0.001), but became weaker and nonsignificant in blacks, Hispanics, or other racial/ethnic groups. Irrespective of actual weight, those who were satisfied with their body size were more likely to engage in regular physical activity than those less satisfied. Further research is needed to explore predictors of physical activity to reduce health disparities.     

Review article: Polonia studies and the collapse of Communism

This paper asks to what extent Suriname's consociational democracy still rests on its historically shaped meta-ideology of ethnic essentialism. Based on ethnographic data of the country's national elections in 2010, I suggest that the ‘ethnic taboo’ of ethnic mobilization by politicians was present to a certain extent. However, this taboo was challenged by the nationalist turn of Desi Bouterse's National Democratic Party. Furthermore, when considering voting behaviour and that of ethnically mixed Doglas in particular, we see that Surinamese politics is more complex. I will argue that while we have been thinking about Surinamese politics as being on a par with ethnic groupings, these 2010 elections were not simply about ethnicity. Ethnicity may have informed but did not fully explain people's political choices, because people are too complex to be captured in an exclusively ethnic category, and because the Surinamese political system is too complex to maintain clear ethnic categories.     

Social Factors and Leukocyte DNA Methylation of Repetitive Sequences: The Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis

Epigenetic changes are a potential mechanism contributing to race/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in health. However, there is scant evidence of the race/ethnic and socioeconomic patterning of epigenetic marks. We used data from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis Stress Study (N = 988) to describe age- and gender- independent associations of race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status (SES) with methylation of Alu and LINE-1 repetitive elements in leukocyte DNA. Mean Alu and Line 1 methylation in the full sample were 24% and 81% respectively. In multivariable linear regression models, African-Americans had 0.27% (p<0.01) and Hispanics 0.20% (p<0.05) lower Alu methylation than whites. In contrast, African-Americans had 0.41% (p<0.01) and Hispanics 0.39% (p<0.01) higher LINE-1 methylation than whites. These associations remained after adjustment for SES. In addition, a one standard deviation higher wealth was associated with 0.09% (p<0.01) higher Alu and 0.15% (p<0.01) lower LINE-1 methylation in age- and gender- adjusted models. Additional adjustment for race/ethnicity did not alter this pattern. No associations were observed with income, education or childhood SES. Our findings, from a large community-based sample, suggest that DNA methylation is socially patterned. Future research, including studies of gene-specific methylation, is needed to understand better the opposing associations of Alu and LINE-1 methylation with race/ethnicity and wealth as well as the extent to which small methylation changes in these sequences may influence disparities in health.     

Between (Racial) Groups and a Hard Place: An Exploration of Social Science Approaches to Race and Genetics, 2000–2014

As the social sciences expand their involvement in genetic and genomic research, more information is needed to understand how theoretical concepts are applied to genetic data found in social surveys. Given the layers of complexity of studying race in relation to genetics and genomics, it is important to identify the varying approaches used to discuss and operationalize race and identity by social scientists. The present study explores how social scientists have used race, ethnicity, and ancestry in studies published in four social science journals from 2000 to 2014. We identify not only how race, ethnicity, and ancestry are classified and conceptualized in this growing area of research, but also how these concepts are incorporated into the methodology and presentation of results, all of which structure the discussion of race, identity, and inequality. This research indicates the slippage between concepts, classifications, and their use by social scientists in their genetics-related research. The current study can assist social scientists with clarifying their use and interpretations of race and ethnicity with the incorporation of genetic data, while limiting possible misinterpretations of the complexities of the connection between genetics and the social world.     

Altitude,heredity and body proportions in northern Chile

Recent studies of the effects of hypoxia on human growth and adult size have focused mainly on the variability of single measurements. In this paper we explore changes with altitude and ethnicity (Spanish-Aymara ancestry) in body proportions of permanent residents of an altitudinal gradient (0–4000 meters) in northern Chile. Body proportion or shape is assessed by anthropometric indices and principal components of 14 bone measurements. Ethnicity independent of altitude had its major effect on proportions and a lesser effect on size. Aymara had larger relative sitting heights, broader builds and prominent facial development as compared to non-Aymara (Spanish). Altitude also affected head and chest proportions during growth. On the whole, the effects of altitude and Aymara ancestry on the measurements and indices were independent (not necessarily of similar direction or magnitude), in spite of a correlation of ethnicity and altitude in Andean populations.