Measuring Identity: A Guide for Social Scientists

The concept of identity has become increasingly prominent in the social sciences and humanities. Analysis of the development of social identities is an important focus of scholarly research, and scholars using social identities as the building blocks of social, political, and economic life have attempted to account for a number of discrete outcomes by treating identities as causal factors. The dominant implication of the vast literature on identity is that social identities are among the most important social facts of the world in which we live. Abdelal, Herrera, Johnston, and McDermott have brought together leading scholars from a variety of disciplines to consider the conceptual and methodological challenges associated with treating identity as a variable, offer a synthetic theoretical framework, and demonstrate the possibilities offered by various methods of measurement. The book represents a collection of empirically-grounded theoretical discussions of a range of methodological techniques for the study of identities.

Rawi Abdelal is Professor at Harvard Business School. He is the author of National Purpose in the World Economy: Post-Soviet States in Comparative Perspective (2001) and Capital Rules: The Construction of Global Finance (2007).

Yoshiko M. Herrera received her BA from Dartmouth College (1992), and MA (1994) and PhD (1999) from the University of Chicago. From 1999–2007 she taught at Harvard University, as an Assistant Professor and then as John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Government. Since 2007 she has been Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research interests include identity and ethnic politics, political economy, bureaucratic reform, qualitative methods, public health, and the states of the Former Soviet Union.

Alastair Iain Johnston is the Laine Professor of China in World Affairs in the Government Department at Harvard University. He is the author of Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (1995) and Social States: China in International Institutions, 1980–2000 (2008), and co-editor of Engaging China: The Management of an Emerging Power (1999), New Directions in the Study of China's Foreign Policy (2006), and Crafting Cooperation: Regional Institutions in Comparative Perspective (2007).

Rose McDermott is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Risk Taking in International Relations (1998), Political Psychology in International Relations (2004), and Presidential Leadership, Illness, and Decision Making (2008).