This paper was presented by Professor C. Matthew Snipp at the 'Social Science Perspectives on the 2008 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey' conference, 11-12 April 2001, The Australian National University, Canberra. The session title was 'Indigenous perspectives on Indigenous evidence in the social sciences'.

Matthew Snipp has shown in his past research that there is a great deal of volatility in the reporting of race by persons of American Indian ancestry. It was initially believed that this was probably an isolated phenomenon for a relatively small population. However, there have been other recent studies which reveal the presence of response variability in Asian and Hispanic ancestry groups. It has been hypothesized that much of this variability is linked to rising rates of intermarriage and growing numbers of persons who can claim a multiracial ancestry. Matthew is currently working with CPS and other Census data that were especially collected using several different variations of a question designed to elicit information about racial identification. He is particularly interested in how factors such as residence, education, and family composition are related to racial identification and especially to questions about multiracial backgrounds, and how this might change under different scenarios of immigration and intermarriage rates.

C. Matthew Snipp is Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor of Humanities and Sciences in the Department of Sociology and Director, Center for Comparative Studies of Race and Ethnicity, Stanford University.

Presentation slides from the session can be downloaded below.