gregm
New Member
- Since
- Mar 14, 2011
- Messages
- 3,334
- Score
- 0
- Tokens
- 0

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...-most-and-least-ethnically-diverse-countries/
This was printed today in the Washington Post but it is a 11 year old survey and it seems pretty strange. I am surprised to see parts of Africa as the most diverse, but the survey is implying that even groups that are are racially the same but don't share the same language ,religion etc. will identify as different ethnic groups. I don't understand why Northern Ireland and some places in Europe wouldnt be described as more "diverse". Afghanistan is less diverse than India? Japan and the Koreas are the most homogenous.
The US is less diverse than Canada? The article mentions that maybe Quebec maybe counted as different ethnicity and maybe a larger native population and there were some comments after the article about the phone survey and hyphenated nationalities in various countries. The Americas were more diverse than Europe or Asia obviously but Chile and Argentina ranked differently. The survey is using ethnical diversity in a different way than just racial diversity.
"One thing the Harvard Institute authors did with all that data was measure it for what they call ethnic fractionalization. Another word for it might be diversity. They gauged this by asking an elegantly simple question: If you called up two people at random in a particular country and ask them their ethnicity, what are the odds that they would give different answers? The higher the odds, the more ethnically “fractionalized” or diverse the country."
"There are a few trends you can see right away: countries in Europe and Northeast Asia tend to be the most homogenous, sub-Saharan African nations the most diverse. The Americas are generally somewhere in the middle."
Before we go any further, though, a few important caveats, all of which appear in the original research paper as well. Well, all except for the report’s age. It’s now 11 years old. And given the scarcity of information from some countries, some of the data are very old, dating from as far back as the early 1990s or even late 1980s. Conceptions of ethnicity can change over time; the authors note that this happened in Somalia, where the same people started self-identifying differently after war broke out.
And so can the actual national make-ups themselves, due to immigration, conflict, demographic trends and other factors. It’s entirely possible, then, that some of these diversity “scores” would look different with present-day data.
Another caveat is that people in different countries might have different bars for what constitutes a distinct ethnicity. These data, then, could be said to measure the perception of ethnic diversity more than the diversity itself; given that ethnicity is a social construct, though those two metrics are not necessarily as distinct as one might think. Finally, as the paper notes, “It would be wrong to interpret our ethnicity variable as reflecting racial characteristics alone.” Ethnicity might partially coincide with race, but they’re not the same thing."
Last edited: