Experimental Design Workshop | April 7 [Virtual] - Incite at Columbia University

Join us for a workshop presentation. This event is free and open to the public.

The Effect of Cross-Cutting Cleavages and Intra-Group Heterogeneity on Ethnoracial Boundaries in the United States

Flavien Ganter (Sociology, Columbia University)

Recent immigration and fertility trends have greatly diversified the United States population as a whole. They have also made ethnoracial categories more internally heterogeneous along a variety of dimensions such as skin color, economic status, or nativity.

By generating similarities between and dissimilarities within categories, social cleavages that cut across ethnoracial boundaries pose a visible challenge to the long, tenuous presumption that U.S. ethnoracial categories demarcate coherent, discrete social groups.

In this project, I design a novel survey experiment to investigate the effect of cross-cutting social cleavages on the salience of ethnoracial boundaries in the United States. The experiment will manipulate participants’ perceptions of economic heterogeneity within and similarity between ethnoracial categories, and it will use a conjoint design to capture how these perceptions affect the relative importance of ethnoracial symbolic boundaries in people’s apprehension of the social world.

About the Experimental Design Workshop

The workshop gives social scientists the opportunity to workshop the design of an experiment they have not yet fielded. Graduate student and faculty presenters will present their designs and receive specific, actionable feedback from other workshop participants. A list of our previous sessions can be found here.

For inquiries or if you are interested in joining the workshop's email list, please contact Daniel Tadmon (daniel.tadmon@columbia.edu) or James Chu (jyc2163@columbia.edu).

Funding support for the Experimental Design Workshop is provided by the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Lecture Series, administered by INCITE, which features events and programming that embody and honor Lazarsfeld’s commitment to the improvement of methodological approaches that address concerns of vital cultural and social significance.