252 McNeil
Wendy Roth (PSC Research Associate) was featured in The New York Times and appeared on The Behavior Corner podcast discussing her research on genetic ancestry testing and racial perceptions.
Wendy Roth (PSC Research Associate) created a video for the Penn Latin American and Latinx Studies Program (LALS) describing her career and research on the dynamics of racial classification in the United States and Latin America. Roth discusses some her of past and current projects surrounding the questions of why and how racial classification changes across
cultures and geographies.
Wendy Roth (PSC Research Associate) was featured in a Slate article about how DNA tests change our understanding of genetics and identity perception.
Associate Professor of Sociology
Ph.D., Sociology and Social Policy, Harvard University, 2006
My research focuses primarily on how social processes challenge racial and ethnic boundaries and transform classification systems. I’ve examined this with regard to immigration, interracial marriage and the classification of multiracial children, and genetic ancestry testing. I am also interested in the multiple dimensions of race – how self-identification, observation by others, known ancestry, genetic ancestry, phenotype, and other dimensions are increasingly diverging, and what this means for survey statistics and the racial inequalities they are used to measure.
My current research examines the social impact of genetic ancestry testing, focusing on how tests influence racial and ethnic identity, conceptions of race, racial attitudes, and racial interactions. One project conducted 115 qualitative interviews with people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds who purchased genetic ancestry tests. Another project is a randomized controlled trial that randomly assigns people to receive genetic ancestry tests or not, to study the causal impact of testing.
