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Impacts of Multiple Race Reporting
This project will investigate the following questions regarding the 1997 revisions to Statistical Policy Directive No. 15, Race and Ethnic Standards for Federal Statistics and Administrative Reporting, a revision of the federal standards for collecting data on race and ethnicity, to be adopted by all federal agencies working with race-based information:
- How will the perceived racial composition of nonmetropolitan areas change when analyzed in the context of mixed-race individuals and families?
- How will the introduction of multiple race categories influence comparisons between metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas?
- What are the regional differences in the makeup of mixed-race households among nonmetropolitan areas?
- How will the transition to identifying multiple races for individuals affect programs important to rural health and rural health financing?
- How can longitudinal data be effectively bridged across the change in classification systems for analyzing rural health data?
- How might the new system hinder rural population analysis through data loss from confidentiality suppression and small cell size?
The research questions will be answered by reviewing policy briefs used in drafting the policy revisions, studying public documents associated with the testing of Census Bureau questionnaires, reviewing other published materials, interviews of healthcare providers and policy administrators, and analysis of national data files containing multiple race reporting.
Publications
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Impacts of Multiple Race Reporting on Rural Health Policy and Data Analysis
Author(s): Randy Randolph, Rebecca Slifkin, Lynn Whitener, Anna Wulfsberg
Report Number: Working Paper No. 73
Date: 05 / 2002
Examines some of the impacts to rural health analysis of new federal policy that allows people to choose one or more race categories when classifying themselves. Implementation of the new policy in the 2000 Census yields 63 possible combinations of race classification. Report also presents data on the number of persons choosing more than one race, discusses ways that analysts can handle the issues surrounding multiple race data, and compares several methods for bridging the change from the old single-race system to the new multiple-race system. Among its findings: rural Americans were less inclined to identify themselves as more than one race than were urban Americans; rural western residents were the only ones more inclined to choose multiple races than the rural average; and rural residents of Hawaii, Alaska, and Oklahoma were the most likely to identify with multiple races while those of Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina were the least likely to do so.
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