Richard Webber: Ancestry and self-identification as a basis for predicting behaviour
05 January 2015

As you might imagine promoting the use of names as a means of inferring people’s ancestral backgrounds generates lively debate.

A criticism I often encounter in academic circles is that people should be entitled to decide for themselves what ethnic group they belong to, not have this second judged by people they have never met. For a moment this seems reasonable. That is until one realises that social scientists have no issue using an analogous practice they originated nearly a hundred years ago, inferring a person’s social class from the type of job they do.

Thinking about the potential discrepancy between the ethnic groups people identify with and the category that I might infer from their name has caused me to rethink the whole process of ethnic categorisation, particularly after examining the results of polls YouGov conducted during the period leading up to the Scottish election.

Let’s start with what YouGov discovered.

One of the less publicised issues during the referendum campaign was the plight of the many millions of Scots disenfranchised from voting because they currently live in England, Wales or Northern Ireland. To assess the difference it would have made had they been eligible to vote, YouGov included in their survey of non-Scottish residents a question on attitude to Scottish independence. Inferring ancestry from respondents’ surnames they found that outside Scotland Scottish ancestry added a ten percentage points to the level of support for Scotland remaining within the Union comparing other types of surname.

Among Scottish respondents they found strongest support for independence among people with Irish Catholic surnames, a group which until 2014 had been the traditional bedrock of the Labour vote in Scotland. This group accounted for exactly 10% of Scottish adults. Their support for independence is ten percentage higher than Scottish residents with Scottish surnames.

Both behaviourally and numerically then this is an important segment of the Scottish electorate. But one would not be aware of this from the results of the 2011 census. When asked to declare which ethnic group they belong to a mere 1% or respondents claimed Irish identity.

So, which is a correct measure of the size of the Irish community in Scotland, one per cent or ten per cent? And which is the more appropriate method of establishing identity when conducting analyses of attitudes and behaviour?

The correct answer, in the opinion of my business partner Trevor Phillips and myself, is that the two indicators are measuring significantly different aspects of ethnicity. A person’s family name, particularly if that person is a male, is usually an indicator of distant background, of where parents, grandparents or even earlier generations came from. It is not typically as much an indicator of an ethnic group, narrowly defined by race, as of a cultural group defined more widely in terms of common history, language and religion. By contrast self-identification is more typically a forward looking measure of aspirations people have for themselves and their children.

Criticisms are often made of social scientists and market researchers that what they tend to measure is what people say rather than what they do. By implication behaviour may be a more reliable indication of the existence of group norms. There is no doubt that a distinctive attitude towards independence does characterise a much larger social group in Scotland than just those who self-identify as Irish. If further evidence of the size and strength of identity of this group is needed ask yourself why otherwise it should be unnecessary for the capacity of Parkhead, the stadium in which Celtic football club play, to exceed the number of Scots identifying themselves as Irish in the 2011 census.

The findings of almost every analyses we run is that distant historical heritage is far more resilient in terms of behaviour than even members of ethnic groups realise. This is particularly the case in choice of employment.

As a result of the YouGov survey work my thinking has moved on in an important way. Where the results obtained from the use of names are inconsistent with the results obtained from the use of questionnaires, I no longer see this as a source or error. I have come to realise that there is no “correct” objective measure of a person’s ethnicity; that heritage and identity are aligned only to a degree; and that “who people think they are” accounts only to a limited degree for the distinct behaviours that members of minority populations continue to exhibit long after their ancestors arrive in this country.

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Any views or opinions presented are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the MRS Census and Geodemographic Group unless otherwise specifically stated.