Abstract
A majority of anthropologists find race to be a biologically meaningless concept and use terms such as ethnicity, which has acknowledged cultural components, to describe the diversity of human populations. While some medical journal editors have issued statements agreeing with this position, many medical researchers continue to use race as a demographic variable. A survey of articles in the journal Pediatrics was compared to articles published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. Over 50% of the articles reviewed used the term race or “coded” racial terms such as “blacks,” suggesting that an anthropological approach has not been incorporated into the literature. In the journal Pediatrics, non-U.S. studies were more likely to specify geography (39.9% vs. 29.9%), while race/ethnicity was more often specified for U.S. populations (61.0% vs. 13.2%). Only 44 (8.9%) of the papers in all three journals that describe race or ethnicity used more specific categorizations (e.g., Vietnamese American) than the traditional racial groupings of White, Black, Asian, Hispanic, Native American, and Pacific Islander. The discussion focuses on a comparatively simple way to incorporate appropriate demographic information into a study where funding, time, sample size, sample diversity, or other factors limit the ethnogenetic aspects of the research, including a prototype questionnaire. Fuller understanding of the environmental, cultural, and genetic interactions that affect health in both children and adults will not be possible until these variables are incorporated into both basic and clinical medical research.
