Making Sense of New Census Classifications for RacePosted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, United States, Women on 2011-01-10 01:37Z by Steven |
Making Sense of New Census Classifications for Race
UCLA School of Public Health Magazine
June 2007
page 31
STARTING WITH THE 2000 CENSUS, the federal government revised how it collects data on race and ethnicity—respondents were allowed to identify themselves as a member of more than one category (which 7 million opted to do), whereas in prior censuses they were forced to choose one. The revision was made in recognition of the nation’s growing number of interracial couples, who in turn are producing children whose diverse lineage defies a single classification. But the change also creates potential nightmares for researchers and policymakers who rely on the data from these and other surveys to understand racial and ethnic disparities in health: When you consider all of the possible combinations, including “other,” there are now 63 multiple-race categories along with the six single-race categories.
Tommi Gaines, a UCLA School of Public Health doctoral student in biostatistics [Currently biostatistician at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine], is tackling the challenges arising from the new collection method. “There have been goals that have been set around understanding why differences exist between races and how we can develop policies to try to eliminate or reduce these differences,” Gaines notes. “If there are disparities found between multiracial populations and a single-race category, how do we accurately reflect what’s going on with the multiracial populations, which capture a broad range of people? It becomes harder to tease out the potential problems that are causing these health differences.”…
…“As long as there continue to be differences between races in regard to health conditions, we need to continue to collect and find ways to make sense of the data so that we better understand why these disparities exist.”
Read the entire article here.