Sorry to have been silent for the last few days, I’ll fill in later today or this week. Anyway folks, before people pack up for the holidays here’s a very useful research note from sociologists at the University of Surrey’s Social Research Unit.

Amongst other things the researchers point out that:

ethnic categories are fluid and context specific

the fluidity of categories makes it hard to make comparisons over time

Census categories such as ‘Black African’ - can in practice be used to describe people with widely differing national origins, language, and religions.

Researchers need to be wary of ‘over-researching’ particular ethnic groups leading to ‘fatigue’. People can get irritated by excessive researcher interest. This can make the community/group unwilling to cooperate, feeling as if they are ‘lab rats’ or similar.