Mixed Race Studies

Changes in racial categorization over time and health status: an examination of multiracial young adults in the USA

Ethnicity & Health
Published online: 2015-06-08
DOI: 10.1080/13557858.2015.1042431

Karen M. Tabb, Assistant Professor of Social Work
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

• Objective: Multiracial (two or more races) American health related to racial stability over the life course is a pressing issue in a burgeoning multi-ethnic and multicultural global society. Most studies on multiracial health are cross-sectional and thus focus on racial categorization at a single time point, so it is difficult to establish how health indicators change for multiracials over time. Accordingly the central aim of this paper was to explore if consistency in racial categories over time is related to self-rated health for multiracial young adults in the USA.
• Methods: Data were drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) survey (N = 7957). Weighted multivariate logistic regression was used to exam health status in early adulthood between individuals who switched racial categories between Waves 1 and 3 compared to those who remained in the same racial categories.
• Results: There were significant differences in report of self-rated health when comparing consistent monoracial adults with multiracial adults who switch racial categories over time. Diversifying (switching from one category to many categories) multiracial respondents are less likely to report fair/poor self-rated health compared to single-race minority young adults in the fully adjusted model (OR = 0.20; 95% CI [0.06–0.60]).
• Conclusion: These results demonstrate the importance of critically examining changes in racial categories as related to health status over time. Furthermore, these results demonstrate how the switch in racial categories during adolescence can explain some variations in health status during young adulthood.

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Esther Cepeda: The complexities of race and ethnicity

GazetteXtra
Janesville, Wisconsin
2015-10-17

Esther Cepeda, Columnist
Washington Post Writers Group

CHICAGO

Our society gives a lot of lip service to the importance of diversity in fields such as science, medicine and technology because multicultural people bring unique viewpoints, varied life experiences and new ideas.

Rarely do we come upon an ideal example of how this plays out in real life.

Karen M. Tabb Dina, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, recently published a paper in the journal Ethnicity and Health that found that adults who identified as one race when they were young but now identify as multiracial report being healthier compared with those who continue to identify as monoracial.

The idea for this study came 10 years ago when Tabb Dina was a health policy researcher in low-income communities studying how race and ethnicity impact long-term health. She noticed that the way some of her patients identified racially didn’t always match the way their medical records categorized them.

Identity is a complex and often thorny issue. There are many reasons—including education level, geographic location and gender—why someone with a multiracial background would choose to identify as a single race or multiracial, and why that could change throughout a lifetime…

Read the entire article here.

Health Care, Research Failing to Adapt to U.S.’s Growing Multiracial Population

School of Social Work
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
2015-10-12

Data collection methods in research and health care settings have lagged behind in adapting to the rapidly growing population of multiracials, according to studies led by social work professor Karen M. Tabb Dina

Multiracial people who change their racial identity from a single race to multiracial over time may be healthier than their minority peers who consistently identify as monoracial, new research suggests.

Despite the U.S.’s rapidly growing population of multiracial individuals, researchers and health care systems continue to use outdated approaches to racial categorization that force people to classify themselves as monoracial, which may be masking the incidence of health conditions and obscuring disparities in health care access and utilization among multiracial populations, a University of Illinois scholar said.

Social work professor Karen M. Tabb Dina is the lead author of two recent studies that explored issues of racial identity and its impact on health care access and utilization among nearly 8,000 U.S. young people.

The subjects in both of Tabb Dina’s studies were participants in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, one of the first surveys to allow respondents to identify themselves as multiracial using two or more racial categories, Tabb Dina said.

Participants in the Adolescent Health survey were asked about their racial background during the first wave of data collection in 1994 and again during the third wave, conducted in 2002.

Of the 7 percent of participants identified as multiracial at either wave, only 20 percent of these people selected the same racial categories both times, Tabb Dina found.

Read the entire article here.

Disparities in Health Services Use Among Multiracial American Young Adults

Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health
First online: 2015-09-29
8 pages
DOI: 10.1007/s10903-015-0289-7

Karen M. Tabb, Assistant Professor of Social Work
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Christopher R. Larrison, Associate Professor of Social Work
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Shinwoo Choi
School of Social Work
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Hsiang Huang, Instructor of Psychiatry
Cambridge Health Alliance
Harvard Medical School

Addressing disparities in health services utilization remains critical for improving minority health; however, most studies do not report on the health service use of multiracial young adults (age 22–34). This study compares past year health service use of self-identified multiracial (two or more races) young adults with monoracial White young adults. Weighted survey data from Add Health (N = 7296) and multivariate logistic regression analyses were used. Compared to monoracial White young adults, Black-White multiracial [OR 0.40, 95 % CI (0.17–0.90)] and Black-Native American multiracial [OR 0.23, 95 % CI (0.09–0.63)] young adults are less likely to report primary care service use in the past year. Multiracial young adults have different health care service utilization than their White monoracial peers with Black-Native American young adults appearing to be particularly vulnerable to under-utilization of primary care services. It is important to examine multiracial subgroups when studying patterns of health services utilization.