Diversity Worksheet

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Associate Program Material

Diversity Worksheet

Answer each question in 50 to 150 words. Provide citations for all the sources you use.

1. What is diversity? Why is diversity valued?
Diversity can mean many different things. The actual definition in the dictionary states that diversity is a range of different things/ the state of being diverse;variety. But in my opinion, diversity is a commitment to not only recognizing but appreciating or valuing the variety of various characteristics that make us as individuals unique in an atmosphere that promotes and celebrates individual and collective achievement.

2. What is ethnocentrism? In what ways can ethnocentrism be detrimental to a society?
Ethnocentrism is the preferencing of an individual’s culture over the cultures of any other group. Or tendency to believe that one's ethnic or cultural group is centrally important, and that all other groups are measured in relation to one's own. It can be good for the individual country because it helps society stick together as a whole, but it often is a bad thing for the world as a whole. Understanding ethnocentrism and its relation to race in public health research is particularly important in the United States because of its history of using race in classifying and judging different groups.

3. Define emigration and immigration.
Emigration is leaving one country to settle in another. Immigration is the movement of people into a country or region to which they are not native in order to settle there or coming into a new country as a permanent resident.

4. What are some of the ways groups of people are identified?
There are several ways that groups of people are identified for example by race, ethnicity, age, social class, and size or weight. Many times you will find that when filling out your information for a job they will ask certain questions about you to identify you from everyone else.

5. Why do people label and group other people?
People label and group others as a way to identify them or set out their differences from other people whether they are good or bad. Labeling and judging people are often confused with one another and can cause conflict.

6. Define culture. Is culture limited to racial and ethnic backgrounds? Explain.
Culture is the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving. Culture is not limited to racial and ethnic backgrounds because all of the beliefs and things that are learned are passed down through each generation. Different races develop different cultures it isn’t something that is only set for each race or ethnicity.

The University of Tennessee Libraries Diversity Committee. (2003). The university of tennessee. Retrieved from http://www.lib.utk.edu/diversity/diversity_definition.html

G. Hofstede, I. (1998). http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/choudhury/culture.html. Retrieved from http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/choudhury/culture.html