Mixed Race Studies

From multiracial children to gender identity, what some demographers are studying now

Pew Research Center
2016-04-08

D’Vera Cohn, Senior Writer/Editor

The nation’s largest annual demography conference, held in Washington, D.C., last week, featured new research on topics including couples who live in separate homes, children of multiracial couples, transgender Americans, immigration law enforcement and how climate change affects migration. Here is a roundup of five of the many innovative posters and papers from the Population Association of America meeting, some based on preliminary work. They give insight into the questions on researchers’ minds. (To see the conference presentations by our own Pew Research Center experts, check out this page.)…

…Children of multiracial couples

When two people of different races have a child together, how do they choose to identify the race of their child on census forms? Carolyn A. Liebler and José Pacas of the University of Minnesota analyzed U.S. census data from 1960 to 2010 – a period of dramatic rise in interracial marriage that has resulted in a corresponding growth of the multiracial population. Since 1960, Americans have been allowed to choose their own race on census forms, rather than having enumerators do it for them. Although the census form did not offer people the opportunity to check more than one race box until 2000, the researchers found that some did so as early as 1980.

Their research found that not all interracially married parents checked more than one race box for their young children. Different groups varied in their responses, too. Some factors mattered in how parents did report race: Interracial couples living in the West, the region with the largest Asian and Pacific Islander population, were more likely to report their child is Asian and Pacific Islander, alone or in combination with another race. A child of a white or black male householder was more likely to be reported as the same race as the father.

But other factors, such as whether a parent is Hispanic (an ethnic category, not a race), didn’t make a consistent difference, the researchers found. In general, the share of married people living in a census tract who have mixed-race marriages is not linked to how the child’s race is reported…

Read the entire article here.

Changing Answers but Not Identities: A Qualitative Investigation of Race Responses in a Longitudinal Survey

Population Association of America
2009 Annual Meeting
Marriott Renaissance Center
Detroit, Michigan
2009-04-16
19 pages

Kelsey Poss
University of Minnesota

Carolyn A. Liebler, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Minnesota

Paper presented at the 2009 annual meetings of the Population Association of America on May 1, 2009

We seek to understand why people change their race responses over time. We use longitudinal survey responses to selectively recruit individuals for in-depth interviews about the reasons behind their changing responses to questions about their race(s) and primary racial or ethnic identities between 1988 and 2007. We find a wide variety of changes in 33 individuals’ answers to questions about their race, ancestry and Hispanic origin. To date, we have completed in-depth interviews with nine of these individuals. In many cases, respondents do not remember changing their answers and do not consider themselves to have changed their identities. Respondents’ post-hoc accounts of varied answers often focus on events or thoughts near the time of the survey and on details of question-wording. Many also report a rationalized process for selective reporting of their race(s), depending on the purpose of the form (e.g., job application versus social club).

Read the entire article here.

Black/Irish: How do Americans understand their multiracial ancestry?

Population Association of America
2009 Annual Meeting
Marriott Renaissance Center
Detroit, Michigan
2009-05-01
19 pages

Aaron Gullickson, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Oregon

Ann Morning, Assistant Professor of Sociology
New York University

In recent years, studies examining the racial identification of mixed-race individuals on surveys and the U.S. Census have proliferated. The majority of these studies either use parental racial information or a comparison of answers to the race question in different contexts to identify a multiracial population. This paper proposes another method for identifying a multiracial population that is broader and potentially more historical in its understanding of its multiracial heritage, by comparing the ancestry responses on the 1990 and 2000 U.S. Census. The analysis clearly demonstrates that the identification patterns of multiracial individuals vary in systematic ways depending on which groups are involved that correspond to historical evidence on the dynamics of racial boundaries.

Introduction

Although the United States has been home to a significant multiracial population since its founding, American scholarly interest in the racial identity of mixed-race people is a fairly new phenomenon. This development is due in large part to the federal government’s recent change in its official classification system to allow individuals to identify with more than one race (see Office of Management and Budget 1997). With multiple-race statistical data now available, especially after Census 2000, it became clear that millions of Americans would choose to “mark one or more” races when given the opportunity. This observation entailed new relevance for existing social scientific research on identity formation. In particular, Mary Water’s (1990) description of “ethnic options” for white Americans offered a template for thinking about the “racial options” that mixed-race people might confront.

In this article, we seek to explain patterns of racial self-identification by multiracial people in the United States. Do they prefer to select one race or several to describe themselves, and why? Using census data from 1990 and 2000, we identify a mixed-race population by targeting adults who report having ancestry in more than one racial group. This approach offers several advantages over the more common method of equating the multiracial population with the children of interracial unions. First, it allows us to analyze the self-reported identity of adults rather than the parent-proxied identity of children. Second, this approach captures a multiracial population that is broader and potentially more historical in its understanding of multiraciality than the post-Loving “biracial baby boom” often identified by researchers.

The racial affiliations of mixed-race people offer insights into both macro-level historical trends in racial ideology, and micro-level mechanisms of contemporary social stratification. As we will see, the identity choices that individuals make today continue to be shaped by concepts of race that formed centuries ago: ideas (or their absence) of the properties of races and the nature of hybridity still dictate to a considerable extent how people conceive of their racial membership. Perhaps more important, some observers see in multiracial identity choices a harbinger of the future, either as the vanguard of an imminently miscegenated U.S.A., or as a “swing” faction that might eventually be incorporated in the white population (Gans 1979; Lind 1998; Sanjek 1994; Yancey 2003). On a more prosaic yet no less significant level, the ways that multiracial people identify themselves reveal a great deal about the continuing impact of class and gender in shaping the opportunity set of race labels that are available to them…

Read the entire paper here.

Shifting Demographics: Preparing for a New Race and Ethnicity Classification Scheme in NAEP

Population Association of America
2010 Annual Meeting Program
2010-04-17
3 pages
1 chart, 1 table

Salvador Rivas
American Institutes for Research

On September 24, 2007, the U.S. Department of Education (USDE) issued final guidance for collecting and reporting race/ethnicity information to all its jurisdictions. Final implementation of these guidelines is expected to take place no later than the 2010–2011 school-year. This study will therefore try to anticipate how and to what extent the coming change in racial/ethnic classification schemes might affect NAEP trend reporting, especially in relation to previously established racial/ethnic achievement gaps. By using student-reported race/ethnicity information, as proxy parent reports, this study will explore the possible effects of the coming shift in racial/ethnic classification schemes. Data will come from the 2003, 2005, and 2007 NAEP Reading and Mathematics assessments at Grade 8. This study will also explore the possibility of using other data sources such as the American Community Survey (ACS) to help corroborate and contextualize NAEP findings.

Read the entire summary here.

Measuring Race (and Ethnicity): An Overview of Past Practices, Current Concerns and Thoughts for the Future [Draft]

Population Association of America
2010 Annual Meeting Program
2010-04-17
25 pages

C. Matthew Snipp, Professor of Sociology
Stanford University

On the eve of the 2010 census, Census Bureau staff are already beginning to think about how race should be measured in the 2020 census. This paper looks at the history of racial measurement, assesses the performance of the current standard in the context of a 1996 NAS report, and concludes with a set of considerations that must be taken into account for the purposes of assessing race in the census or in any survey instrument. Particular attention is given to a variety of legal definitions that have historically been used to measure race, followed by the first issuance of OMB Directive No. 15 in 1977, and then followed by the latest revision in 1997. Discussion of how various federal agencies have adjusted to the 1997 revision is also included in this discussion.

Read the entire draft paper here.

Geographies of racially mixed people and households: A focus on American Indians

Population Association of America
2010 Annual Meeting Program
2010-04-17
23 pages

Carolyn A. Liebler, Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology and Minnesota Population Center
University of Minnesota

Meghan Zacher
Department of Sociology and Minnesota Population Center
University of Minnesota
March 2010

Multiracial individuals and mixed race households show different residential location patterns depending on the races of the groups involved and the ways in which people report their mixed racial heritage. In this research, we focus on multiracial and interracially married American Indians in recent decades. Although they are substantively interesting, American Indians and multiracial people are rarely represented in social science research on residential location and segregation. Using U.S. public-use microdata from four decades (1980, 1990, 2000, and 2008), we map the locations of two groups of multiracial American Indians and two groups of interracially married American Indians, in comparison to their single-race counterparts. In 1980 and 1990, we measure “multiracial” using the respondents’ answers to both the race and the ancestry census questions. Our disaggregation of different types of mixed-race American Indian households extends the work of Wong (1998, 1999) and Wright et al. (2003) to reflect current sociological knowledge about the varieties of experiences of people in different multiracial situations. By doing so, this research advances knowledge about the social context of race and identity in the contemporary United States.

Read the entire paper here.