An ontology of ethnicity based upon personal names: with implications for neighbourhood profiling Pablo Mateos Department of Geography University College London (UCL) Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of: Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) July, 2007 An Ontology of Ethnicity based upon Personal Names 2 Author’s declaration I, Pablo Mateos, confirm that the work presented in this thesis ‘An ontology of ethnicity based upon personal names: with implications for neighbourhood profiling’ is exclusively my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. This work was undertaken with the partial support of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Camden Primary Care Trust who received a proportion of funding from the NHS Executive. The views expressed in this publication are those of the author and not necessarily of the NHS Executive nor of the ESRC or University College London. An Ontology of Ethnicity based upon Personal Names 3 Acknowledgements I must thank, first of all, my supervisor Paul Longley, who has provided support, advice and guidance throughout this PhD. I will be always indebted to him for his constant encouragement and support from the moment I expressed an interest in studying a PhD at UCL. Furthermore, Paul’s spirit, good mood and sense of humour in these three years have made the PhD experience most enjoyable. Thanks must go to Camden Primary Care Trust (PCT) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) who funded this PhD through a Knowledge Transfer Partnership with UCL (KTP-037). The Public Health Intelligence team at Camden PCT was very supportive throughout the research. I am specially indebted to Richard Webber for his source of inspiration, input and supervision throughout this PhD. Through him I would like to thank Experian for providing free of charge part of the data that made this research possible. Many people gave me very valuable ideas, support or materials through my research, amongst them; Ken Tucker, Mario Cortina Borja, Kate Jones, Maurizio Gibin, Alex Singleton, and many others too numerous to mention here. I am grateful to you all. I am also grateful to various anonymous referees who have provided useful feedback on aspects of the PhD that have been submitted for publication and for the helpful comments that have been made at conferences when material contained within this thesis has been presented and discussed. I am also thankful to my colleagues at UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), for having made me feel belonging to a big family in London, specially An Ontology of Ethnicity based upon Personal Names 4 through the irreplaceable experience of ‘CASA Wednesdays’, which were fundamental to the ideas and spirit of this PhD, as well as a vehicle for the many friendships made. Finally, I would like to thank my friends, colleagues and family with whom I have shared different bits of the process of this PhD. Without the international support of my brother Ramón in getting me up to speed with Oracle databases I could not have coped with the massive name datasets involved in this project. My wife Brenda has been an amazing companion through these years, without whose support, patience and enthusiasm this PhD would have not been possible. An Ontology of Ethnicity based upon Personal Names 5 Abstract Understanding of the nature and detailed composition of ethnic groups remains key to a vast swathe of social science and human natural science. Yet ethnic origin is not easy to define, much less measure, and ascribing ethnic origins is one of the most contested and unstable research concepts of the last decade - not only in the social sciences, but also in human biology and medicine. As a result, much research remains hamstrung by the quality and availability of ethnicity classifications, constraining the meaningful subdivision of populations. This PhD thesis develops an alternative ontology of ethnicity, using personal names to ascribe population ethnicity, at very fine geographical levels, and using a very detailed typology of ethnic groups optimised for the UK population. The outcome is an improved methodology for classifying population registers, as well as small areas, into cultural, ethnic and linguistic groups (CEL). This in turn makes possible the creation of much more detailed, frequently updatable representations of the ethnic kaleidoscope of UK cities, and can be further applied to other countries. The thesis includes a review of the literature on ethnicity measurement and name analysis, and their applications in ethnic inequalities and geographical research. It presents the development of the new name to ethnicity classification methodology using both a heuristic and an automated and integrated approach. It is based on the UK Electoral Register as well as several health registers in London. Furthermore, a validation of the proposed name-based classification using different datasets is offered, as well as examples of applications in profiling neighbourhoods by ethnicity, An Ontology of Ethnicity based upon Personal Names 6 in particular the measurement of residential segregation in London. The main study area is London, UK. An Ontology of Ethnicity based upon Personal Names 7 Table of Contents Author’s declaration.................................................................................................. 2 Acknowledgements..................................................................................................... 3 Abstract....................................................................................................................... 5 Table of Contents ....................................................................................................... 7 List of Figures........................................................................................................... 12 List of Tables ............................................................................................................ 14 List of Abbreviations ............................................................................................... 16 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ................................................................ 18 1.1. Ethnicity, Collective Identities and Multicultural Cities.......................... 18 1.2. Aim and Objectives...................................................................................... 21 1.3. Methods and Outputs .................................................................................. 22 1.4. Thesis Structure ........................................................................................... 24 CHAPTER 2. CONCEPTS AND MEASUREMENTS OF ETHNICITY ...... 28 2.1. The Geography of Ethnic Inequalities ....................................................... 30 2.1.1. Ethnic inequalities ................................................................................................ 31 2.1.2. Ethnic inequalities in health ................................................................................. 33 2.1.3. Subdividing populations by ethnicity and geography .......................................... 36 2.2. Neighbourhood Profiling and the Segregation Debate............................. 39 2.2.1. The community cohesion debate .......................................................................... 40 2.2.2. Measuring residential segregation........................................................................ 42 2.2.3. Ethnic segregation and neighbourhood profiling ................................................. 45 2.2.4. Meanings of segregation and the geography of ethnic inequalities...................... 48 2.3. Defining Ethnicity and Race ....................................................................... 49 2.3.1. Race ...................................................................................................................... 49 2.3.2. Ethnicity ............................................................................................................... 52 2.3.3. Criticisms.............................................................................................................. 54 2.4. Measurements of Ethnicity.......................................................................... 56 2.4.1. Measurement issues in official ethnicity classifications....................................... 56 2.4.2. The UK Census ethnicity classification................................................................ 58 2.4.3. Issues with official ethnicity classifications ......................................................... 61 2.4.4. The limits to ethnicity data in the UK .................................................................. 63 2.4.5. The limits to comparability between research studies.......................................... 65 2.4.6. Alternative measurements .................................................................................... 67 2.5. Conclusion..................................................................................................... 69 CHAPTER 3. NAMES AND ETHNICITY .................................................. 73 3.1. Languages, Names, Genes and Human Origins ........................................ 75 An Ontology of Ethnicity based upon Personal Names 8 3.1.1. Human and language evolution ............................................................................ 75 3.1.2. Isonymy studies in genetics.................................................................................