01 Section A, Key question 3 - Identity, ethnicity and nationality (part 1)

Identity: the self and other people

Identity involves both how people understand themselves and how other people understand them.

A personal identity concerns someone as a particular individual: for example, being patient or enjoying making music. A social identity connects them to a social category or group, such as a national community. These overlap. Being a musician can be an individual interest and a membership through which someone gains recognition and belonging.

Self-identification means how someone describes themselves. An attributed identity is an identity assigned to them by others. The two may agree, but agreement is not automatic. In an original example, a pupil sees herself as a confident organiser while classmates describe her as quiet because she rarely speaks in a large group. Both descriptions are social meanings; neither is a complete account of the person.

Charles Horton Cooley's Human Nature and the Social Order (1902) explains the looking-glass self: we imagine how we appear to another person, imagine their judgement and develop feelings about ourselves in response. The important step is our interpretation of their judgement. We can misread it. This is a theoretical account of the social self, rather than a survey finding about a particular population. Cooley's original argument.

For example, someone whose family warmly values their pronunciation of a heritage language may take pride in being a speaker. The sociological explanation goes beyond saying that they speak the language: other people's recognition helps make that practice meaningful to their sense of self. However, people can reject a label, seek different companions or reinterpret criticism. Identity is shaped by interaction without being a mechanical copy of every outsider's opinion.

How socialisation creates belonging

People learn ways of belonging through the relationships and institutions around them.

Socialisation is the process of learning a society's or group's culture: its meanings, values and expectations. Agencies of socialisation are the groups and institutions through which this happens. They provide cultural material, encourage some practices and respond to how people behave. Identity develops when people connect these experiences to who they believe they are.

Within the family, stories about relatives and places can give a child a sense of shared origins. Repeated conversations, celebrations or language use allow participation in that heritage. Praise for joining in can make it a source of pride. This is a mechanism: transmitted practice, participation and recognition contribute to a feeling of membership. It is stronger explanation than simply asserting that family affects identity.

Education can encourage national identification through teaching a country's history, displaying national symbols or organising commemorations. Its account of whose experiences belong in that history also matters. A curriculum that includes a pupil's family background can encourage a sense of inclusion; a narrow account may encourage them to question whether others recognise them as part of the nation. These are possible mechanisms, not claims that every school has the same effect.

Peer groups recognise, challenge or reshape identities. Friends may share language, music and humour that make an ethnic background meaningful. Different friends may encourage different practices, and a person can belong to more than one group. The media also offer images of who belongs: news stories, films and online communities provide representations that audiences may identify with or dispute. Seeing someone with a familiar heritage represented in national life can make the combination seem possible and valued.

Religion can connect identity to shared rituals, community relationships or accounts of collective history. It may overlap with ethnicity but is not identical to it: people of the same ethnic background can follow different religions or none. The workplace introduces further relationships. Colleagues may treat someone's language skills as an asset, question their belonging or encourage new ways of presenting themselves. Socialisation continues after childhood.

Consider an original example of a young adult joining a workplace with colleagues from several national backgrounds. Conversations about family histories may make them reflect on an ethnic heritage they previously took for granted. Alternatively, shared experiences as colleagues may make occupational identity more prominent. The same setting offers opportunities rather than a guaranteed outcome; the person interprets and responds to them.

Agencies can reinforce one another or make competing demands. Family approval of a heritage language may coexist with peer pressure to avoid it. Agency, meaning a person's capacity to act and make choices, helps explain their response, although choices are constrained by resources and other people's treatment. A convincing explanation identifies the practice or message, the social response and its effect on belonging.

Ethnicity, culture and variation

Ethnic identity concerns belonging associated with a shared heritage and cultural history.

The Office for National Statistics treats ethnic group in Census 2021 as a self-identified category. Its explanation recognises several possible bases for belonging, including culture and family background. This is a useful reminder that ethnicity involves meanings as well as classifications. ONS ethnic group bulletin.

Language can sustain identity because it makes shared stories, expressions and relationships accessible. Collective histories can connect people who live in different places to a remembered community. Food, celebrations, dress or religion can also express membership when people interpret them as connected to their heritage. Eating a particular dish once, however, does not by itself establish ethnic membership: the meaning and social relationship matter.

Variation exists within ethnic groups as well as between them. Two people who identify with the same heritage may differ in language fluency, religious practice, generation, region or personal preferences. These differences do not automatically cancel their ethnic identity. Conversely, two groups may share a language while retaining distinct histories and senses of belonging. Cultural characteristics are associated with identities, not a checklist for deciding whether someone is an authentic member.

Do not equate ethnicity with race. Race involves socially constructed classifications often linked to perceived physical appearance. Ethnicity centres on cultural heritage and belonging; appearance alone cannot tell us someone's language, customs or self-identification. The National Human Genome Research Institute explains why race and ethnicity should not be treated as fixed biological divisions. NHGRI population descriptors.

Racialisation occurs when people are assigned racial meanings, including assumptions about who they are and how they should be treated. A person may be treated as an outsider because of appearance despite identifying strongly with a national community. Social construction does not mean such treatment has no real consequences. It means the categories and their meanings are created socially, rather than determining cultural behaviour through biology.

Nationality and national belonging

National identity involves a sense of membership of a nation, which need not match a person's ethnic heritage or legal status.

Nationality can refer to legal membership of a state, commonly connected with citizenship. National identity is the social sense of belonging to a national community. A state is a political organisation governing a territory; a nation is a community understood as sharing a collective identity. A state can contain several national identities. Someone can identify as Welsh and British, for example, without treating these descriptions as mutually exclusive.

Legal citizenship and felt belonging must be distinguished. A legal category concerns recognised membership of a state; a national identity concerns how someone understands their connections. ONS therefore asks about national identity separately from ethnic group and allows more than one national identity to be selected. Its Census 2021 definition does not make national identity depend on citizenship. ONS national identity bulletin.

National cultural characteristics can include shared historical accounts, symbols, languages, celebrations or sporting loyalties. They do not have to be followed by every citizen. A person can identify strongly with a nation while criticising its government, ignoring a national sport or speaking several languages. Belonging is not the same as agreeing with everything done in a nation's name.

Two broad understandings of membership help explain disputes about who belongs. A civic understanding emphasises participation in shared institutions, laws and political membership. An ethnic understanding places more emphasis on shared origins, ancestry or inherited culture. People can combine these ideas. These are ways of understanding national membership, not a claim that whole countries fit into two perfectly separate types.

In an original example, a British citizen with Pakistani family heritage identifies as British and Pakistani. Britishness may describe national belonging and citizenship, while Pakistani describes an ethnic heritage; the same word can also express a national connection if that is what the person means. The analyst should establish the meaning rather than guess it from the label. Their family language and national sporting loyalty can coexist.

Why identities matter differently and change

The importance of ethnic and national identities varies between people, across situations and over time.

Salience means how prominent or important an aspect of identity is in a particular situation. Someone may rarely mention nationality in everyday conversation but feel it strongly when living abroad or attending an international event. Ethnic heritage may become especially meaningful during a family celebration. This is a change in emphasis; it does not necessarily mean the person has replaced one identity with another.

Differences between individuals need an explanation. Strong family connections can make ethnic belonging central to daily life, while another person with a similar heritage may place greater emphasis on a national community, occupation or local friendship group. Recognition matters too. Experiences of exclusion may lead a person to seek solidarity with an ethnic community, challenge the exclusion or reconsider national belonging. There is no universal response to discrimination, and people can combine these responses.

Change can occur through migration, new relationships, education, work or changing public representations. Participation in a new community may add a sense of national attachment while family relationships sustain an earlier ethnic identification. Continuity also needs explaining: language use, shared memories and repeated community participation can reproduce belonging over many years. Calling identity socially created does not mean it changes easily or that everyone can choose any label without resistance.

Evidence about changing ideas of national membership

John Curtice and Alex Scholes' 2024 British Social Attitudes national identity report compares survey responses over time. Among respondents to the national identity questions, 76% in 1995 and 55% in 2023 regarded birth in Britain as very or fairly important for being British; the unweighted bases were 1,058 and 1,611. That is a fall of 21 percentage points. The 2023 survey was designed to represent adults aged 18 or over in private households in Great Britain and was completed mainly online, with a telephone option. NatCen national identity report, 2023 technical details.

This suggests changing boundaries of accepted national membership. It does not show that particular individuals changed their identities: different samples were surveyed, and the question measures beliefs about belonging, not respondents' ethnic identities. The change of survey mode also warrants caution when comparing years.

Classification can affect apparent change too. ONS cautions that changes between 2011 and 2021 national identity responses partly reflect a reordered questionnaire in England, where British became the first listed option. A changed answer pattern should not automatically be explained as changed feelings. ONS measurement caution.

In an original worked example, a person moves to a new country and joins a local community organisation while continuing weekly conversations with relatives using a heritage language. New participation can create national attachment through recognition and shared experiences. Family contact can sustain ethnic belonging through continuing cultural practice. The supported judgement is that identities may develop together; the move alone does not prove the old identity disappears. Explaining both the mechanism for change and the mechanism for continuity avoids presenting identity as either permanently fixed or completely free-floating.