First and last names perceived as indexical of race/ethnicity

[Joshua Raclaw]

Hi all,

I'm currently working with a group of social psychologists and
sociolinguists on a project that requires us to doctor a group of grant
applications, such that the reviewers of these grants perceive the grant
author as belonging to particular racial categories (for now, being
perceived as either white or black). The state of the art in social
psychology for this kind of perceptual work seems to be a paper by Bertrand
and Mullainathan (2004), which draw on both census data and experimental
surveys to test whether individuals perceive different first (and last)
names as indexing particular racial identities.

I was curious whether anyone knew of any work in this area that had been
conducted by sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists, however.  One
possible lead was a paper by Purnell, Idsardi, and Baugh (1999) on dialect
and perceived ethnicity, which relied on the use of fictitious names in
telephone surveys as part of its methodology,  though the authors did not
address the potential for these names to also index racial identity.

If anyone has any leads on work in this area, I'd appreciate hearing from
you.

Cheers,

Josh


--

Joshua Raclaw, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Center for Women's Health Research
University of Wisconsin-Madison
https://sites.google.com/a/colorado.edu/joshuaraclaw/