Abstract In response to the American Editors' Consortium Statement (1996) with regard to a minimal classification scheme for describing race/ethnicity, the present study investigated a potential supplementary scheme. Having reviewed the conceptual, theoretical and methodological concerns about the Consortium's scheme, data from 1,071 first-year Canadian university students were examined with regard to demographics, relationships with parents, and psychological well-being. Participants revealed 94 countries of origin, 69 languages spoken at home, identification with 203 cultural or ethnic groups, and an idiosyncratic use of the term visible minority. The supplementary classification scheme proposed is based on immigrant Generational Status-Canadian (GS-C). The data were analyzed according to both the race/ethnicity and GS-C schemes. Results indicated that GS-C differentiated meaningful significant differences on 10 nondemographic variables. Race/ethnicity was confounded with GS-C and, when the confound was addressed, only produced one significant difference. The implications are discussed. As Canadian psychologists submitting manuscripts to American journals for publication, we are often frustrated, if not amused or annoyed, by editors' reviews asking what percentage of our subjects were African-- American, Hispanic, Asian, and non-Hispanic White. These categories often seem inappropriate and inadequate to researchers studying a pluralistic society with a policy of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is best described by Berry (1999) as corresponding to an integration strategy where some degree of cultural integrity is maintained while seeking to participate in the larger dominant society. Berry and his colleagues (for a review see Berry & Sam, 1997) distinguish between acculturation (where the dominant group values both diversity and equity) and assimilation (where the dominant group strives for cultural uniformity of all). Not only does acculturation better represent the Canadian goals of tolerance, diversity, and equity (Berry, 1999), but we believe it embodies a developmental perspective on how immigrant groups adapt to their host country. The current study proposes an additional classification scheme for ethnicity which captures the developmental processes of family socialization into a given society (i.e., perceptions of parenting styles, current relationships with parents, as well as psychological well-being of late adolescents/young adults). The situation described above concerning manuscript feedback from American editors will now become more systemic, given that in 1996 the Editors' Consortium on Development and Psychopathology (representing editors from 17 journals in the field) published a joint statement providing standards for reporting sample descriptions of race/ethnicity information (e.g., Journal of Research on Adolescence, 1996). In conjunction with the National Institute of Mental Health and the MacArthur Network on Development and Psychopathology, they require the use of the following classification scheme as a minimal standard for sample descriptions of race/ethnicity: non-Hispanic White, Hispanic, Black (African American), Native American, Asian-Pacific Islander, and Other. The statement was an attempt to address the editors' concerns with regard to enhancing the scientific goals of sound and replicable research, signalling the need for generalizability of findings, and providing uniform description of the composition of subject samples in published articles. The present authors agree with the concerns expressed by the editors and endorse the belief in the importance of racial and ethnic variables in human development and behaviour. Nonetheless, the present paper considers a variety of issues posed by the Consortium's Statement. The first of these issues is primarily a logical argument suggested by an anonymous reviewer. Of the 17 journals represented by participation in the Consortium Statement, 14 are American journals (i. …