Spotlight on Heterogeneity The Federal Standards for Racial and Ethnic Classification (1996) / Chapter Skim
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Revising Federal Standards: Issues for Consideration
Revising Federal Standards: Issues for Consideration
Pages 35-48
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From page 35... ...
population has reached a stage at which it is ethnically diverse and ethnic intermarriage is increasingly common; consequently, there will be increasing numbers of people with multiple ancestries, for whom future preferences for self-identification are unknown. Workshop participants observed that these factors raise questions about the usefulness of demographic analysis and population projections based on conventional assumptions of "closed" ethnic groups with no exogamy.
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From page 36... ...
o~ ''l'he major exception is research analysis of decennial census data, for which specific ethnic or ancestry categories are often created for analysis. And as noted above, some researchers also conduct their own surveys arid develop their own race and ethnicity coding schemes.
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From page 37... ...
Hispanics are "of" Spanish culture, while American Indians or Alaskan Natives "maintain cultural identification through tribal affiliation or community recognition." From a purely taxonomic standpoint, the current classification suffers from several faults. It does not cover persons of Australian or New Zealand origin.
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From page 38... ...
A MIXED-RACE OR "OTHER" CATEGORY The practical considerations of adding a multirace category or some other option for people of multiple ancestry are many. First, there is the issue of the status of multiracial peoples in terms of current civil rights legislation.
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From page 39... ...
Such questions have the advantage of flexibility for respondents and offer a means of studying trends and 40f course, this possibility also exists for multiracial people under the current standards as well, but it is likely that the creation of an intermediate category would increase transitions between categories, since the "distance" between the categories would presumably be closer (the distance between black and multirace in contrast to the distance between black and white)
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From page 40... ...
Open-ended questions may prove more feasible for major statistical agencies with large data processing resources, like the Census Bureau, than for agencies for which the collection of racial and ethnic data is only a small portion of their administrative mandate, such as the Federal Reserve Board or the Department of Veterans Affairs. Overall, however, closed-ended questions are preferable.
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From page 41... ...
The decennial census collects data on an "other" race, unlike most other agency surveys. As noted above, in order to provide comparable race data with other statistical systems, the Census Bureau developed a Modified Age-Race-Sex file that reassigns the "other race" entries to one of the standard categories.
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From page 42... ...
Since the current directive allows neither a write-in response nor multiple responses, coding is not a major issue. However, if a new standard included open-ended questions, there would be two major concerns: the cost of processing the responses to such a question and the algorithms used to recode or reclassify the write-in responses to other categories.
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From page 43... ...
Thus, if one wants the same statistical reliability for two groups, one of which is 2 percent of the population and one of which is 20 percent of the population, one may need a sampling rate for the small group that is 10 times higher than that needed for the large group. In the current categorization system, the smallest group, American Indians, accounts for close to 1 percent of the population.
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From page 44... ...
Although such an approach permits some people a more accurate selfidentification, there is no straightforward method for comparing multiple responses with single responses. And, as noted above, there is no unambiguous logical way to recode multirace responses into single-race categories.5 5Multiple ethnic responses have been used for recent censuses in Canada, with Statistics Canada (the national statistical agency)
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From page 45... ...
It is not clear, however, how applicable the Canadian statistical experience is to the demands in the United States for racial and ethnic data for protected classes in civil rights legislation and for other compliance and legislative purposes. 6For example, the number of people reporting Cajun as their ancestry group grew from 30,000 in the 1980 census to 600,000 in the 1990 census (Statistics Canada and Bureau of the Census, 1993:42)
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From page 46... ...
Along with mutually exclusive categories, workshop participants expressed a strong preference for exhaustive categories-a system of categorization that includes every person in the population or every combination of attributes used for classification.7 The current system at least in its formal rules- has been criticized for not being exhaustive (e.g., Hahn and Stroup, 1994~: for instance, it does not include people whose ancestry is American Indian but who do not identify culturally with a tribe, and it does not include blacks whose origins are from outside Africa. Since these groups are quite small, however, their omission does not appear to have caused any serious distortions in racial and ethnic data.
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From page 47... ...
Even after a new system is in place, there is the ongoing burden of reconciling data collected under the different systems. Changes would also seriously affect the monitoring of activities related to civil rights compliance, which require comparable data over time.
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From page 48... ...
Nevertheless, they noted that the burdens and costs related to possible revisions, in and of themselves, are not sufficient reasons for maintaining the current standards.
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