Well, I'm talking when you mark checkboxes in surveys or case report forms.

What do you put down?

I mean, the boxes on the forms vary depending on what data they need. Some are in the race mindset, other focus on ethnicity. Others are just crap forms.

The ever-popular Asian/Pacific Islander is normally the closest.

The closest to you, or the closest to what you check? I have a strange suspicion that most of those forms aren't well thought out, but before my mother said "Fuck it, let's go with ethnicity instead" on her data collection, her research, if given three categories put your average Indian into the caucasian file.

I've always associated "Caucasian" with "white" and have interpreted the checkboxes accordingly. They usually have Caucasian, African-American, Hispanic, Native American, and Asian/Pacific Islander, and while that lumps me in with Chinese/Japanese/Vietnamese/Korean, it's the closest and the one I've always chosen. I may have asked the first time and been told to check that and never looked back.

That's an ethnicity form, then, since it has Hispanic (assuming that it's choose one, not choose all applicable--those work better).

I wonder what Gwenyth Paltrow would check?

In the survey I'm doing now, first we ask if you're Hispanic/Latino. If so, there's a follow-up about that. Then we ask about race, and if you say "Asian" there's a follow-up where you pick from Asian Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, or Other.

Pacific Islander is separate from Asian, though. I'm guessing Hawaii was a PSU at some point.

PSU?

That's a good way to poll. What field, Strega?

My mother's a biochemist, and my sister was in qualitative analysis, so they hash these things out quite a bit. I just listen and take the odd note.