ANCESTRYbyDNA: An Aid in Studying Racial Identities

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The principle objective of this SBIR application is to create a desktop platform for measuring biological ancestry proportions from DNA samples to assist social scientists in their study of racial identities. Demographic research on race is becoming increasingly difficult given its multiple measures and the recent federal directive requiring the use of multiracial classification on official forms and surveys. The growing complexity in defining race makes it difficult for the government to measure and assess racial progress, for example, or to put in place a consistent measure of race across statistical systems. Simultaneously, there is a corresponding growth in the country's need to study race. Yet, the growing pressure from federal agencies to reach a consensus on this topic, coupled with the debate over how best to measure it, has led some within demography to suggest there is a looming crisis in racial classification (Harris, 2000). Related measures of race, based on well- known DNA tests, have serious technical and theoretical limitations. The most widely used and best known of these tests suffer from statistical, practical, and ethical problems because they crudely "bin" individuals into a single category. For example, traditional DNA tests cannot recognize diversity in an individual's ancestral origins. Recent advances in genomics and a recently released patent-protected test, called ANCESTRY by DNA, have resulted in the first measure capable of revealing the precise ancestral proportions within each individual. The desktop system proposed in this SBIR application will merge the recently announced ANCESTRY by DNA test with a micro-array chip reader, laptop computer, and new software to create a platform which demographers and other social scientists can easily integrate into their survey research efforts. While not a measure of race, this innovative system at least offers scientists an exploratory tool for use in their effort to understand the social and cultural forces shaping racial identities. Demographers will have at their disposal a sophisticated measure capable of identifying admixture proportions, offering them the option of conducting further statistical analyses comparing ancestry proportions with self-report, parental, and observational measures of race.