Classifying Ethnicity Through People’s Names

Abstract

Several approaches have been proposed to classify populations into ethnic groups using people’s names, as an alternative to ethnicity self-identification information when this is not available. These methodologies have been developed, primarily in the public health literature in different countries, in isolation from and with little participation from demographers or social scientists. This chapter brings together these isolated efforts and provides a coherent comparison, a common methodology and terminology. A systematic review of the most representative studies that develop new name-based ethnicity classifications has been conducted, extracting methodological commonalities, achievements and shortcomings. Their current limitations are mainly due to a restricted number of names and a partial spatio-temporal coverage of the reference population datasets used to produce name reference lists. The chapter concludes with a review of unconventional computational approaches that set the baseline for the development of an innovative name classification methodology in the next chapter (Chap. 7).

“The classificatory role of names proves very useful. By studying names we can find out how the human race divides up and then sort into groups the many people living in a single society” (Smith-Bannister 1997: 15)

This chapter is partly based on material previously published in: Mateos P. 2007. A Review of Name-based Ethnicity Classification Methods and their Potential in Population Studies. Population Space and Place 13(4): 243–263. Part of the text, tables and figures from this article is reproduced here with permission of the journal publisher.