In ‘You’re Supposed to Say White’: Epistemic Ambiguity and Ethnoracial Classification, Stanford PhD candidate Hye Jee Kim and Professor Aliya Saperstein argue that the responses given to race and ethnicity questions in surveys aren’t always as clear-cut as they may appear. These responses are shaped through sometimes hesitant or awkward conversations, in which interviewers and interviewees have to work out what counts as a valid answer—and who gets to decide.

Kim and Saperstein focus on moments when respondents are asked to state their race and whether they identify as Hispanic/Latino in over 300 recorded survey interviews from the UC Berkeley Social Networks Study. They find these exchanges reflect “epistemic ambiguity,” meaning it’s unclear whether the respondent, the interviewer, or an outside authority (like the government) should have the final say. This ambiguity allows respondents who feel uncomfortable naming a standard racial category to pass classification responsibility to another party to communicate that they are being compelled give a particular response. Respondents express this dissatisfaction or discomfort in various ways—they may hedge (“I guess”), offer alternative labels (“Caucasian,” “European American”), add ethnic details (“Italian,” “Romanian”), or use humor to deflect attention from their response (“I’m so White I glow in the dark.”).

A key finding is that very similar answers can end up being coded differently depending on how the conversation unfolds and how the interviewer interprets it. Interviewers sometimes record the label that respondents feel compelled to give (e.g., “White”), and sometimes record the label that respondents prefer (writing in an alternate response under “Other”). This matters because the coded categories are later used to measure racial inequality. Kim and Saperstein recommend that researchers be more transparent about how race/ethnicity data are produced and clearer in survey questions about which aspect of race—a person’s self-identity, how they are typically perceived by others, or officially classified by the government—is of interest.