Researchers commonly ask subjects to self-identify their race from a menu of preestablished options. Yet if race is a multidimensional, multilevel social construction, this has profound methodological implications for the sciences and social sciences. Race must inform how we design large-scale data collection and how scientists utilize race in the context of specific research questions. This landmark collection argues for the recognition of those implications for research and suggests ways in which they may be integrated into future scientific endeavors. It concludes on a prescriptive note, providing an arsenal of multidisciplinary, conceptual, and methodological tools for studying race specifically within the context of health inequalities.

Contributors: John A. Garcia, Arline T. Geronimus, Laura E. Gómez, Joseph L. Graves Jr., Janet E. Helms, Derek Kenji Iwamoto, Jonathan Kahn, Jay S. Kaufman, Mai M. Kindaichi, Simon J. Craddock Lee, Nancy López, Ethan H. Mereish, Matthew Miller, Gabriel R. Sanchez, Aliya Saperstein, R. Burciaga Valdez, Vicki D. Ybarra

LAURA E. GÓMEZ is a professor of law, sociology, and Chicano studies at the University of California at Los Angeles. She is the author of Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race.

NANCY LÓPEZ is an associate professor of sociology at the University of New Mexico. She is the author of Hopeful Girls, Troubled Boys: Race and Gender Disparity in Urban Education.

"The essays from various disciplines in this collection thoughtfully examine how conceptions of race (or ethnicity) create disparities in health care and its outcomes. Recommended."

"Mapping 'Race' provides keen insights about race as a social construction. With its coherent theme and presentation of possible ways to study race and health, this book will fill an important vacuum in the scholarship on the topic."

"an important collection that introduces some of the specific methodological debates on the intersection between race and health inequalities in the USA."

"The arguments in Mapping 'Race' are at the cutting edge of research; the authors' tight focus on health and health disparities is sensible and timely. Besides outlining racial disparities in health, the authors provide an executable set of solutions."

"What is race? The contributors in Mapping Race brilliantly renew, reconsider, and reimagine this question in light of the pressing new challenges facing the way we think about diverging health outcomes. Mapping Race is necessary reading."