Research Areas
Genetic Ancestry Testing and Race/Ethnicity
Genetic ancestry test sales have grown exponentially. By 2022, an estimated 50 million people, and 21% of all U.S. adults, had taken these mail-in tests. Although social scientists have long argued that race is socially constructed, genetic ancestry tests typically present genetic results in categories that overlap with commonly used racial and ethnic categories. Based on a DNA sample, these tests might report what proportion of a person’s ancestry is European, African, Native American, or Asian, for example. Many social scientists are concerned that the popularity of genetic ancestry testing will shift conceptions of race toward an essentialist view that sees races as defined by innate biological traits. At the same time, some have speculated that the tests could break down concepts of racial difference by showing how all humanity is related, and that people who discover unknown racial ancestries may seek out new friends in those racial communities.
My research examines the impact of genetic ancestry tests on racial and ethnic identity, conceptions of the meaning of race, and racial interactions. I conducted several interconnected studies, funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation and two major grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. These include: 1) an online survey and longitudinal qualitative interviews with people from a variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds who have bought genetic ancestry tests; 2) a randomized controlled trial of genetic ancestry testing among native-born White Americans; 3) qualitative follow-up interviews with participants in the randomized controlled trial; and 4) a survey of native-born White Canadians on attitudes toward genetic ancestry testing and conceptions of race.
One part of this research focuses on how test-takers’ ethnic and racial identities are – and are not – influenced by their test results. A 2018 paper published in the American Journal of Sociology, co-authored with my graduate advisee Biorn Ivemark, shows that test-consumers do not automatically defer to their test results in a manner predicted by genetic determinism, the belief that genes determine a person’s race or ethnicity. Rather they are influenced by social considerations to selectively pick and choose identities in a manner we describe as exercising genetic options. We specify the mechanisms shaping this process; test consumers are influenced by their identity aspirations – their preferences for the ethnic or racial identities they seek to claim, and their social appraisals – their assessment of how others will accept their identity claims. While all test consumers are influenced by these mechanisms, we highlight racial and ethnic differences in the identity aspirations test consumers have, with White test-takers seeking to add new identities that offer them optimal distinctiveness, something more unique or interesting than being “just White,” and Black and Hispanic test consumers having fewer aspirations to change their already distinctive and politically and culturally salient group identities. As a result, racial background and social considerations influence the willingness of test consumers to adopt geneticized identities.
In two book chapters, also co-authored with graduate students, I further elaborate on the motivations and identity changes of test consumers. One chapter examines the construction of different types of Indigenous identities by test consumers, who use genetic tests as a way to bolster claims of Indigenous belonging that do not reflect their lived experience (Golbeck and Roth 2012). Another chapter sheds light on the population of early test consumers, documenting their interest in genetic genealogy and their curiosity about their race and ethnicity as the primary motivations for testing, yet revealing that very few have meaningful interactions with new people or communities across racial lines (Roth and Lyon 2018).
Publications from my randomized controlled trial compare the experiences of White Americans who take genetic ancestry tests and those who do not. In a paper published in PLoS One, my co-authors and I analyze whether taking the tests increases essentialist views of race as biologically fixed and determining innate abilities (Roth et al. 2020). To do so, we develop a new scale to measure belief in genetic essentialism for race (Yaylacı, Roth, and Jaffe 2021). Using this scale, we show that the tests’ impact on essentialist beliefs varies by individuals’ knowledge of genetics. Essentialist beliefs significantly decline among test-takers with high genetic knowledge, but significantly increase after testing among those with the least genetic knowledge. This reveals the crucial importance of test-takers understanding the science on which these tests are based.
Another paper, published in Social Problems, analyzes the effect of genetic ancestry testing on ties across racial groups (Roth, Côté, and Eastmond 2022). Early media stories of test-takers focused on how the tests connected them to new relatives or connections across racial lines, and suggested these tests could be a new way to break down racial boundaries. Yet we find that the racial diversity of test-takers’ social networks actually decreases after testing, significantly more than those who do not take the tests. To explore this unexpected finding, we conducted qualitative follow-up interviews with participants of the randomized controlled trial and develop a theory we call reconsidering racial appraisals – that test-takers come away from the experience with a new appreciation of the complexity of determining someone’s race and greater uncertainty over how to classify others. Rather than experiencing a reduction in their interracial ties, they become less willing to definitively classify the race of those in their social network. Using both quantitative and qualitative data to support this theory, we show the importance of how people view and interpret the race of others for understanding racial interactions and network diversity.
I expand my work on genetic ancestry tests’ impact on identities in “Genetic Options and Constraints: How Genetic Ancestry Tests Change Ethnic Identities,” which is forthcoming in the American Journal of Sociology (Roth and Yaylacı 2023). In this analysis, Şule Yaylacı and I use the randomized controlled study data to address limitations in my and others’ earlier work on this topic using qualitative interview data. Specifically, to more accurately estimate the causal impact of the tests on identity, we examine the counterfactual of how much identity change would likely have occurred without testing (through comparison to the control group). We also account for a crucial element that my earlier work could not consider: the impact of the percentages of ancestries reported in admixture tests, the most popular type of test, as well as the interplay between these reported percentages and people’s identity aspirations. For this sample, we find low rates of racial identity change; ethnic identity changes are significantly higher for test-takers, but only a relatively small amount can be attributed to test-taking rather than identity fluidity that would likely have happened anyway. Although we find support for identity aspirations as a mechanism of identity change, it is significantly constrained by the ancestry percentages the tests report. Test-takers tend to adopt and retain identities consistent with genetic ancestries reported at high percentages, and are more likely to drop identities consistent with ancestries reported at low percentages, regardless of their aspirations. Yet in the middle range, where genetic ancestries are more ambiguous and open to interpretation, their identity aspirations come into play. A striking finding of the study is that test-takers were much more likely to drop previously claimed Native American identities than people who did not take tests. The tests generally did not support their claims to Native American ancestry, which leads these test-takers to relinquish their claims to this highly valued identity. The paper also addresses recent growth in the population identifying as multiracial in the 2020 census, which some have speculated that genetic ancestry tests may contribute to. I argue that early test-takers may have contributed partly to this growth, but we are unlikely to see continued growth in the population checking two or more races as a result of genetic ancestry tests.
Multiple Dimensions of Race
My work contributes to a growing area of research theorizing and measuring the multiple dimensions of race. In past research, and in most demographic data collection, race has been treated as a single, consistent classification. Yet growing numbers of people do not experience race in this way, but rather as a number of conflicting dimensions. How they are seen by others (observed race) often does not match how they classify themselves; frequently how they classify themselves on surveys and censuses (self-classification) does not match how they actually identify (racial identity). The compiled racial classifications of their ancestors (racial ancestry) may only selectively inform these other dimensions although it is historically treated as the basis for racial classification in the U.S. Their skin color and racialized features (phenotype) creates further variation in their lived experience of race, including how they are treated. Some surveys capture another dimension of race – how people believe they are seen by others (reflected race) – which may itself shape behavior and interactions in ways not well understood. With the word “race” used as a proxy for all of these dimensions, much of our scholarship and public discourse is actually comparing across several distinct, albeit correlated, variables. Yet which dimension of race is used can significantly influence findings of racial inequality.
Many of these themes run through my book, Race Migrations (2012), and my 2010 article in Social Science Quarterly. In 2014, I co-organized a conference on these themes with Mary Campbell and Jenifer Bratter, titled “Measuring the Diverging Components of Race in Multiracial America.” As part of the conference, my collaborators and I created a data resource to aid further research in this area which summarizes existing datasets with measures of multiple dimensions of race and details how each dimension is measured (Bratter, Campbell, and Roth 2014). We also co-edited a volume of American Behavioral Scientist in 2016 to highlight cutting-edge work on the topic (see Campbell, Bratter, and Roth 2016).
“The Multiple Dimensions of Race,” published in Ethnic & Racial Studies (Roth 2016) synthesizes this field and lays out a theoretical articulation of what many of these dimensions are and how they should be used. Several of my subsequent articles also contribute to this scholarship.
Race in Latin America & U.S. Latinos
Another area of my scholarship focuses on how race and discrimination are understood in Latin America and how transnational migration to the U.S. influences those conceptions and racial stratification. My book, Race Migrations (2012), examines how race and discrimination are understood by Dominican and Puerto Rican populations, both in the Hispanic Caribbean and those who migrate to the United States. I focus on these populations as theoretically significant cases, because racial mixing of European, Indigenous, and African populations in the Hispanic Caribbean produced a contemporary population that spans the Black-White color line that has historically mattered most in the United States; therefore, migrants arriving in the U.S. from the Hispanic Caribbean often find themselves classified as a different race than how they see themselves. I illustrate that individuals maintain and use multiple racial schemas simultaneously, reflecting different conceptions of race, different comparison groups, and informed by the experiences of different societies, yet communicated between them and used in both sending and receiving societies.
In a paper published in Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies (Roth 2013), I challenge traditional notions of Blackness in the Dominican Republic based on what Dominicans adopt from these transnational communications. I argue that many Dominicans understand an Americanized notion of Blackness and where they fall within it. I also critique the simplified notion that all Dominicans would be considered Black in the U.S., maintaining that today a strict “one-drop rule” has given way to a system that focuses more on phenotype and culture than ancestry, especially for Latinos. This illustrates how the mass migration of Latinos from the Hispanic Caribbean to the U.S. has changed norms of racial classification in the U.S.
My work also demonstrates that sending and receiving society comparisons are necessary to avoid methodological nationalism – falsely attributing social processes to what is happening in only one country by overlooking the influence of the sending or receiving society’s influence on the other. In a 2013 article in International Migration Review co-authored with Nadia Y. Kim, we address explanations of immigrants’ anti-Black prejudice, adopting a transnational approach that incorporates processes creating prejudice from both inside and outside the receiving society. Showing how attitudes move across borders through immigration, transnationalism, and globalization, we argue that anti-Black prejudice held by Dominican and Korean immigrants in the U.S. is partly shaped in their sending societies and is not simply formed by their interactions with African-Americans after arrival.
A paper in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity (Roth and Marin 2021) extends this focus on avoiding methodological nationalism through sending and receiving society comparisons to the study of social networks to understand racial integration. Here, we also innovate by analyzing not just the racial composition of social networks but also its color composition, or how much individuals’ social ties resemble their own skin color. We compare color homogamy in the social networks of Dominican and Puerto Rican migrants to the U.S. and non-migrants who remain in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. We develop and test new theories about how the color composition of Latino migrants’ social networks might compare with those of their counterparts in their sending societies. Ethnic unifier theory predicts that ethnicity becomes a more salient identity in the receiving society than previous dividing lines like color and class, thereby uniting more co-ethnics across those lines. By contrast, color line racialization theory predicts that the highly salient Black-White color line in the U.S., which shapes where people live, socialize, and work, will make migrants’ networks more homogeneous by color than in the sending society, and will shape the primary group attachments that individual Latinos develop as they integrate in American society. We find support for color line racialization theory in migrants’ ties to White and Black Americans. Yet among Latinos’ co-ethnic ties, we find patterns of color homogamy (darker migrants tend to have darker social ties than lighter migrants) that are similar in both migrants and non-migrants, and we argue that the color homogamy we see in the U.S. is not necessarily due to the experience of racialization there.
I also investigate the dynamic relationship between conceptions of race and socioeconomic status, focusing on the case of Mexico, in a 2022 paper in American Sociological Review, “Beyond Money Whitening: Socioeconomic Privileging on Multiple Dimensions of Race in Mexico.” Patricio Solís, Christina Sue and I consider how these core sociological concepts shape one another, as epitomized by the concept of money whitening – that higher wealth or status leads to being seen or treated as whiter than appearance alone would justify. Applying a theoretical framework of race as multidimensional, we develop a broader theorization of the underlying process as one in which socioeconomic status can improve one’s position in a racialized hierarchy on some dimensions of race, but may work differently across them. Furthermore, we argue that national ideologies shape the nature of the racialized hierarchy, such that in some cases, categories other than white may be at its top. The paper analyzes a nationally-representative survey of Mexico with unique measures of respondents’ ethnoracial self-classifications, observed ethnoracial classifications by interviewers, self-assessed skin color, perceived skin color assessments by interviewers, and digital skin color ratings from an innovative, highly reliable color rating device. We find a predominant pattern of socioeconomic status increasing the odds of a mestizo classification, particularly in respondents’ self-classifications and driven by their education. Yet interviewers also “whiten” respondents with greater wealth. At the same time, both respondents and interviewers “lighten” respondents with greater wealth on skin color scales. We emphasize that flexibility in perceiving, assigning, or embracing racialized labels or ratings is used to provide an additional form of racial privilege to those who already have socioeconomic privilege. We also demonstrate the importance of considering these processes along different dimensions of race. The seemingly non-hierarchical, integrating ideology of mestizaje valorizes a mestizo identity in Mexico, which obscures the continuing hierarchical stratification by color. This work reveals the complexity of social stratification, which can unfold differently across dimensions of race.
Racial Appraisals and Classification Norms
Another strand in my research involves how racial classification norms change over time and place. In one of early papers (Roth 2005), I examine differences over time in how interracial couples classify the race of their multiracial children. There, I show that while the one-drop rule is still influential, most families with Black intermarriages reject it and many create unique interracial options for classifying their children. Norms of racial classification are also an important focus of my book (Roth 2012), where I developed a new photographic instrument and methodological technique for leading interview respondents through a discussion of how they classify the race of others. I expanded on this approach in a book chapter (Roth 2015), where I discussed the use of photo elicitation to study racial and ethnic schemas, the bundle of racial or ethnic categories a person perceives along with the set of rules for what they mean, how they are ordered, and how to apply them to oneself and others. Like all cognitive schemas, ethnic and racial schemas are culturally shared representations that overlap across individuals in a community. Understanding the schemas people use illuminates the social norms of classification that operate in a society, and provides insight into these macro-level constructs through the micro-level rules they employ in classifying themselves and others.
In the article “Unsettled Identities Amid Settled Classifications: Toward a Sociology of Racial Appraisals,” in Ethnic & Racial Studies (Roth 2018), I argue that the primary sociological focus on racial identities overlooks the importance of observed race or racial appraisals – how people classify the race of others. While recent scholarship has focused on the fluidity or flexibility people exercise in their racial identities, racial appraisals are not necessarily changing in a similar way. I maintain that race scholarship lacks broad approaches focusing on societal-level norms of racial classification or assessments of the societal racial order, and I lay out a research agenda for the study of racial appraisals as a field of sociological inquiry to assess how norms of racial classification change over time. I illustrate how controversial cases of racial identification can be leveraged to shed light on racial classification norms, using empirical data to analyze public reactions to the non-normative racial identity of Rachel Doležal, a leader of a Washington state NAACP chapter who was born to a White family but came to identify as Black. Empirically, I show that White Americans reject the idea that race is something people can choose and continue to view it as determined by genetics and/or racial ancestry. I argue that tracking racial classification norms or perceptions of the racial order longitudinally would provide the clearest indication of changes in racial boundaries and hierarchies, and also allow analysis of how major political or historical events and demographic change influence racial classification.
A collaboration with Ariela Schachter (Washington University in St. Louis), funded by an NIH R21 grant, asks “How Does Genetic Ancestry Testing Affect Perceptions of Race?” This project examines how genetic ancestry test results, in combination with other sources of information, affect norms of racial classification by others. Using a conjoint survey experiment with Black, White, and Latino respondents, we examine the influence of genetic ancestry test results, physical appearance, racial self-identification before and after testing, and the social context influence the racial classification of others. Through this study, we are analyzing whether increased genomic knowledge is shifting norms of racial classification, and also whether the new identities genetic ancestry test-takers adopt are accepted by others, and how much the context matters to our judgments. For instance, we explore whether people are more willing to accept a test-influenced identity when the individual is registering to donate bone marrow than when applying to college, to join a cultural club, or in a neutral context.
Through another collaboration with Maria Abascal (NYU) and Cynthia Feliciano (Washington University in St. Louis), entitled “Social and Demographic Influences on the Classification of Latinos,” I link my interest in racial appraisals, photo elicitation, and the classification of U.S. Latinos. Latinos are expected to double in size by 2050, yet debates about the growing majority-minority population hinge on a narrow definition of who is “majority” (i.e. White) and an expansive definition of who is “minority,” such that anyone who identifies or is identified as of Hispanic origin is considered a minority. However, given the substantial phenotypic heterogeneity among Latinos, some Latinos may be seen as White, while others are seen as Latino, and others as Black or another race. We surveyed representative samples of White, Black, and Latino respondents, asking them to classify photos of individuals from a Match.com database, the majority of whom self-identify as Latino. We are analyzing how classification of photos as Latino varies by the viewer’s race, geographic area, the racial composition of their locality, and their degree of interracial contact.
Racial Essentialism
I am also interested in conceptions of race — or how people understand what race is — and particularly essentialist views of race. In the 2020 paper published in PLoS One, my co-authors and I analyze whether taking genetic ancestry tests increases essentialist views of race as biologically fixed and determining innate abilities. We developed a new scale to measure belief in genetic essentialism for race (Yaylacı, Roth, and Jaffe 2021). Using this scale, we show that the tests’ impact on essentialist beliefs varies by individuals’ knowledge of genetics. Essentialist beliefs significantly decline among test-takers with high genetic knowledge, but significantly increase after testing among those with the least genetic knowledge. This reveals the crucial importance of test-takers understanding the science on which these tests are based.
In a paper in the Annual Review of Sociology, co-authored with graduate students Elena van Stee and Alejandra Regla-Vargas, we conduct an exhaustive review of scholarship on different beliefs about the nature of race and ethnicity, including constructivist and essentialist views. The review highlights that sociologists have contributed significantly to our understanding of race and ethnicity as socially constructed, but largely overlook the fact that many Americans continue to hold essentialist views. We synthesize scholarship, much of it from psychology and other disciplines, about the correlates of different beliefs about the nature of race, the consequences of holding these views, and interventions to reduce essentialist beliefs. We call for sociologists to pay greater attention to the range of beliefs individuals hold about the nature of race and the social implications of these beliefs.
In a 2023 paper in Ethnic and Racial Studies co-authored with my graduate advisee Olivia Hu and Xiang Lu (a former research assistant), we examine genetic ancestry test consumers’ racial conceptualization – their fundamental understandings of the nature of race, including what race is, where it comes from, and what differentiates races from one another – and how they view the testing experience as influencing their race concepts. Drawing on qualitative interviews with test consumers, we find that test-takers’ concepts do not fall into a clear dichotomy between constructivist and essentialist beliefs, but reflect a range of views along a continuum between the two. We present a typology of their views, focusing on the relationship between race and genes. This has implications for how we teach about what race is, especially as genetic ancestry information becomes more widely available.
In another project, I consider how beliefs in racial essentialism compare across societies. In developing the genetic essentialism scale for race (Yaylacı et al. 2021), I gathered data on both White Americans and White Canadians. Preliminary analyses reveal higher rates of belief in racial essentialism among White Canadians than among White Americans. In a paper exploring this contrast with Şule Yaylacı and Derek Robey, we focus on the role of multicultural policies in shaping concepts of race. We expect that multiculturalism’s celebration of difference may unintentionally reify those differences within racial groups.
Previous Pedagogical Project
Study of International Student Integration
In 2006, I created the Study of International Student Integration at UBC as a pedagogical exercise to give students in my qualitative research methods classes (SOCI 382 and SOCI 503) hands-on experience conducting in-depth interviews. As the number of international students at UBC and in Canada dramatically increased, it became important to consider whether they were receiving the support they needed and what their integration experiences were like. Furthermore, as new immigration rules helped international students obtain temporary work permits after graduation, and those doing so could then follow a facilitated route to permanent residency through the Canadian Experience Class visa, I hoped students could explore what role immigration to Canada played in students’ decisions to attend university at UBC.
Students in my sections of SOCI 382 and 503 conducted interviews with international and/or domestic students. They gained experience in qualitative methods and also contributed to a data resource available to researchers interested in this topic. There are 474 qualitative interview transcripts (292 international, 182 domestic) in this data resource, conducted between 2006-2017. To date, students have used this resource for:
- A peer-reviewed journal article by UBC graduate students and faculty on the experiences of students who fall between the cracks of the administrative definition of international and domestic students, and who therefore often fail to take up needed resources as a result.
- A Master’s thesis in Teaching English as a Second Language on how international students mobilize their linguistic resources. This thesis won the Best MA Thesis Award in the Department of Language and Literacy Education, UBC Faculty of Education.
- A Master’s degree practicum project on Asian students’ motivations for studying in Canada by a student in the UBC Institute of Asian Research.
- A sociology undergraduate honors’ thesis comparing the experiences of US, other international, and domestic students at UBC.
- An undergraduate independent study comparing non-White international and domestic students’ reactions to racism.
- Supplementary data for dissertation research on “Third Culture Kids,” who have spent a significant portion of their developmental years in more than one society before immigrating again as adults.
- A peer-reviewed journal article on international students’ post-graduation migration plans by a UBC Sociology graduate student and faculty member.
- An article on international students’ perceptions of discrimination, the composition of their friendship networks, and their participation in groups on campus by a UBC Sociology Ph.D. student.
- An article on the adaptation challenges and information sources of international graduate students in Canada, by a Ph.D. student at UBC’s School of Library, Archival and Information Studies.
- An undergraduate sociology honors’ thesis on the integration experiences of third culture kids relative to other international students at UBC.
- An article on the social integration of international undergraduate students into campus organizations and the distinctive formal and informal campus cultures experienced by international and domestic students, by UBC Sociology Ph.D. students.
- A Master’s thesis on Latin American students’ integration at UBC by a visiting student from Latin American Studies at the Facultad Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales in Buenos Aires, Argentin
Kerry Greer has taken over as the contact for this project. Anyone interested in working with the data should contact her at kerry.greer-at-ubc.ca