ABSTRACT
This chapter explores several issues related to ethnic identity in the United States. It provides demographic tools, including qualitative analysis of historical census schedules and statistical analysis of census and survey data from 1910 and 1980. The chapter provides direct evidence on ethnic group competition and assimilation and how these issues of ethnic identification and assimilation are intertwined with the data collection mechanisms used by official agencies. The country's demographic diversity has made issues of ethnic identity, assimilation, and cultural pluralism particularly prominent in the United States. Every wave of population migration that involves different ethnic groups heightens concerns about the ability of groups to associate. The chapter presents ethnicity to represent a membership in a social subgroup whose basis for commonality arises out of cultural physiognomic, and linguistic traits passed on by birth. It concludes with a summary of substantive findings and discussion of the relationship between the measurement of ethnicity and the measurement of social science processes.
