Genetic Genealogy as a Window into Genomic Science: Racial Boundary Blurring and Reification

The data include four short vignettes that specify hypothetical individuals of various racial and ethnic backgrounds who have submitted their "DNA" for genealogical testing. The vignette provides the test’s "results," manipulating them in various ways. Respondents are then asked to react to the posited results. The four questions, the three response categories, and the positive or negative pole within each response category are randomly ordered. The gender of the hypothetical person matches that of the respondent. The race of the hypothetical person matches that of the respondent for questions 1 and 2, but will differ from that of the respondent for questions 3 and 4. (For purposes of this survey experiment, we treat black, white, Hispanic, Asian American, and multiracial as mutually exclusive and conceptually identical “races.”)