Race, Ethnicity, and Health in a Global Context

Systematic review of queer and minority identities in romantic relationships research

“…Race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation are all social identities that people hold and are related to differential treatment and life experiences (Boykin et al, 2010;Leggon, 1999;Simon et al, 2015;Valentine & Shipherd, 2018). In relationship dynamics, it is important to include these perspectives and to change our lens for how we understand relationships beyond cisnormative heteronormative monogamous vanilla understandings of relationships (Hammack et al, 2019).…”

“…At this time, these reviews often focus on nation-level representation (e.g., Western) rather than looking within nations to give estimates of what percentage are we investigating majority racial identities and privileged groups (e.g., White people in Western contexts). Racial identity and ethnicity are both social constructs that are not directly related to genetic differences, biological markers, or other definitive categorizations that must exist as two separate concepts (Boykin et al, 2010;Leggon, 1999;Simon et al, 2015). The way that racial identity and ethnicity tend to be reported in psychology most often reflects identity terms and language used in U.S. or Western contexts.…”

“…In Australia and Europe, ethnicity as broad regional groupings or cultural and ethnic countries of origin are first considered (Renzaho, 2023). Racial identity and ethnicity are both social constructs that are not directly related to genetic differences, biological markers, or other definitive categorizations that must exist as two separate concepts (Boykin et al, 2010;Leggon, 1999;Simon et al, 2015). However, due to both persistent institutionalized racism and discrimination based on other characteristics, like language or religious barriers, we considered both concepts separately as they pertain to the U.S. For racial identity, we closely matched the reporting in the articles to census categories, and for ethnicity, we considered Hispanic/Latine and Middle Eastern as the reporting of Hispanic is often in addition to racial identities like Black or White or for Middle Eastern is often left out and not included in census categories yet (see Supplement B).…”

“…For race and ethnicity, our approach was to separate the two concepts, whereas often they are reported as one concept to describe our samples. There is a standard in the U.S. to treat race as a social identity considered relevant to physical attributes like skin color which does not truly account for the complexity of ancestry (Boykin et al, 2010;Leggon, 1999), and to treat ethnicity as a measure of shared culture that tends to refer more to the recent past (Simon et al, 2015). One challenge of condensing race and ethnicity into one concept is that, within other nations, one ethnic group may be privileged yet by U.S. definitions of race they would be considered the same category.…”