Department of Anthropology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2011;6(8):e23986. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0023986. Epub 2011 Aug 29.
Health and socioeconomic disparities tend to be experienced along racial and ethnic lines, but investigators are not sure how individuals are assigned to groups, or how consistent this process is. To address these issues, 1,919 orthodontic patient records were examined by at least two observers who estimated each individual's race and the characteristics that influenced each estimate. Agreement regarding race is high for African and European Americans, but not as high for Asian, Hispanic, and Native Americans. The indicator observers most often agreed upon as important in estimating group membership is name, especially for Asian and Hispanic Americans. The observers, who were almost all European American, most often agreed that skin color is an important indicator of race only when they also agreed the subject was European American. This suggests that in a diverse community, light skin color is associated with a particular group, while a range of darker shades can be associated with members of any other group. This research supports comparable studies showing that race estimations in medical records are likely reliable for African and European Americans, but are less so for other groups. Further, these results show that skin color is not consistently the primary indicator of an individual's race, but that other characteristics such as facial features add significant information.
健康和社会经济差距往往沿着种族和族裔划分，但调查人员不确定个体是如何被分组的，以及这个过程的一致性如何。为了解决这些问题，研究人员检查了 1919 名正畸患者的记录，至少有两名观察者对每个人的种族和影响每个估计的特征进行了评估。非裔美国人和欧洲裔美国人的种族一致性很高，但亚洲人、西班牙裔和美洲原住民的一致性则不高。观察者最常认为对估计群体归属很重要的指标是名字，尤其是对亚洲和西班牙裔美国人。这些观察者几乎都是欧洲裔美国人，他们最常认为肤色是种族的重要指标，仅当他们也认为被观察对象是欧洲裔美国人时才这样认为。这表明在一个多元化的社区中，浅色皮肤与特定群体相关联，而一系列较深的色调则可以与任何其他群体的成员相关联。这项研究支持了类似的研究，表明在医疗记录中对种族的估计对于非裔美国人和欧洲裔美国人来说可能是可靠的，但对于其他群体来说则不太可靠。此外，这些结果表明，肤色并不总是个体种族的主要指标，而是面部特征等其他特征提供了重要信息。
