Cultural Data

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Understanding Cultural Data

Overview

Cultural Data identifies a person's affiliation with specific racial, cultural, or religious groups. Many minority groups in the US maintain strong ethnic ties where traditional cultural norms are recognized and practiced.

Identifying Cultural Groups

Cultural Data estimates attributes based on name and geographic information:

estimated_ethnic_group - Estimated ethnic group of the person.
estimated_ethnicity - Estimated ethnicity of the person.
estimated_language - Estimated spoken language of the person.
estimated_primary_language - Estimated primary language of the person.
estimated_religious_affiliation - Estimated religious affiliation of the person.
estimated_country_of_origin - Estimated country of origin of the person.

Cultural Assignment Process

Data Axle Cultural Data uses a name evaluation process that is not based solely on surname. It analyzes the full name and then applies ethno-linguistic and geocentric rules to identify specific ethnicity, religious, and language information for people.

General Process

The process initially uses first_name to determine the specific culture, followed by last_name. The middle name is used as a tiebreaker between two or more cultures.

When first and last name produce ambiguous data, thousands of proprietary rules are applied. This includes checks for misspellings and specific pieces of names that point to culture. For example, all last names ending with "OGLU" are Turkish.

Geography

Cultural Data also considers geography where large concentrations of certain ethnic, religious, and language groups are known. For example, John Smith could be English or African-American depending on his geographic location.