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Self-identification shifts such as these can initially create apparent improvements in the demographic characteristics of Native Americans as a group. When analyzing longitudinal data on outcomes such as income, education, and health, researchers should consider possible identity shifts.
Existing evidence on racial and ethnic identity suggests that the early 21st century is a time of changing notions of racial and ethnic identity as immigration continues to fuel the growth of the Asian and Hispanic populations, as intermarriage rates continue to increase, and as the federal government begins to take into account the implications of mixed racial heritage or origins.
As the previous discussion shows, the way in which Americans have seen themselves and one another has been influenced by the federal racial and ethnic classification schemes.
At the same time, these classification schemes have responded to changes in how people identify themselves and others. The changes between the and Censuses are only the more recent examples of these shifts. Next we review the racial and ethnic classification schemes employed by some of the largest federal data sets used to study racial and ethnic disparities in the health of the aging population.
Although we discuss only a few of the major data sets, this will help us to understand the limitations of the available data for the study of these complex racial and ethnic identities. What we know about racial and ethnic differences in health is, of course, largely driven by the kind of racial and ethnic data available.
There are many sources of information about health, so it would be impossible to discuss all the intricacies of how racial and ethnic data are collected for health surveys.
However, a few major federal data collection efforts are very important in their own right, and have a significant impact on how other surveys collect racial and ethnic data. For this reason, it is important to examine how the largest federal data sets measure race and ethnicity. Despite its limited measures of health and aging, changes in the Census will affect our understanding of health for two reasons.
First, the Census provides one of the largest data sets available to researchers, which allows panethnic groups to be broken down into subgroups, such as nationality groups. Thus, we must rely on the Census for our information about some of the smallest groups. Second, many other large surveys look to the Census and the guidelines set by OMB to decide how to frame their own race and ethnicity items, so changes in the Census often affect many other surveys.
As noted earlier, the Census permitted individuals to identify with more than one racial group. This change could have a significant effect on health statistics for some groups because it is clear from early results that some groups have a much higher percentage of multiracial individuals than others.
In other words, groups such as American Indians and Asian Americans are likely to have a much higher percentage of their population switch to a multiracial identity than African Americans or whites. This will change our understanding of racial differences in health to the degree that these multiracial individuals differ from the monoracial groups they were selecting before. Older people were less likely than younger people to be affected by this change. Table contains some information on the racial composition of the population of different ages from Census These figures illustrate the well-known fact that the population of individuals 65 and older is less diverse than the younger population.
More importantly for our purposes, the results show that the percentage of people who report or are reported as being of two or more races declines consistently as we move upward through the age groups. Hispanic identity has been and continues to be measured in a question separate from racial identification.
Individuals were constrained to choose only one Hispanic group in the Hispanic identification question although they could include multiple identities in the question about ancestry b U. Bureau of the Census, b.
Hirschman and colleagues argue convincingly that there is little reason to keep the Hispanic origin and race questions separate.
In fact, there are good reasons for putting them together. The results from the Race and Ethnic Targeted Test RAETT laid out by Hirschman and colleagues showed that the percentage of individuals who did not respond to the question about race declined significantly when the Hispanic and race questions were combined into an origins question and people were allowed to select more than one group.
They argue that the concept of origins seems to be closer to how most Americans think about diversity than the old concepts of race and ethnicity. One issue raised by combining the race and Hispanic questions is whether this affects our ability to identify and study black Hispanics. Many Americans regard substantial numbers of Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Hispanics from other countries of origin in Central and South America as black.
Black Hispanics are of interest to social scientists and to those who are interested in monitoring health because they represent an interesting combination of ascribed statuses. We do not know to what extent those who are seen as black Hispanics by Americans and thus by social scientists necessarily see themselves in the same way; they may identify more as black or more as Hispanic.
Consequently, all we can do is compare the results of various forms of self-identification, including the old way of forcing a choice of race followed by a choice of Hispanic origin, the Census way of forcing a choice of Hispanic origin followed by allowing people to choose more than one racial category, or the Hirschman and colleagues proposal to combine the two questions and allow individuals to choose more than one.
Table shows the percentage of individuals who identified as both black and Hispanic in the Census, the Census, and in the combined panel with the option of choosing more than one response in the RAETT. In , 3. In the Census, 2 percent of the Hispanic population was recorded as black, Bureau of the Census, a.
In the combined question used in the RAETT, approximately 75 percent of Hispanics identified themselves as Hispanic only, while 0. The next most common category was white and Hispanic. Most importantly, the percentage of individuals who do not respond to the race question is reduced dramatically by using a combined question, especially among Hispanics.
The best we can hope for, and what we should try for, is a count that represents how people see themselves. Racial Distribution of the Hispanic Population percentage. Information on the racial and ethnic characteristics of the respondents comes from the home interview.
Then respondents are asked to self-identify with one of the major racial categories. Many of the results of the NHANES that are reported are still limited to reports of only whites, blacks, and Mexican Americans because of constraints of the sample size.
The goal of this survey was to provide a sample large enough about 16, to allow estimation of the health of Hispanics in general, as well as of specific groups such as Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, and Puerto Ricans. To do this, the NHANES instrument was adapted in small ways such as the addition of an acculturation scale and translated into Spanish so respondents could choose to participate in Spanish or English.
The Mexican-American sample comes from selected counties in five southwestern states 14 with a sample size of 9, In all areas, all Hispanics were asked to complete the survey, so there are small numbers of Hispanic respondents from other groups. The health outcomes of Hispanics might be different in areas where they are much less concentrated, an issue that cannot be addressed with HHANES data.
The survey, also run by the National Center for Health Statistics, is designed to cover basic health and demographic items, with supplements for specific health topics. The NHIS has been interviewing households since , and is a continuous cross-sectional survey. An important change for researchers interested in racial and ethnic differences was the addition in of a detailed breakdown for Asian American groups.
Since , information has been available for nine Asian subgroups, and this information can be used to study these groups if the data are pooled over years to achieve a sample of sufficient size. Once OMB released its new guidelines for collecting racial and ethnic data in federal surveys, the NHIS race and ethnicity questions were revised. Since , the NHIS has asked four questions about race and ethnicity. Respondents are asked if they identify as Hispanic, and those who do are asked to select a specific Hispanic origin group.
This format is particularly useful to researchers because it allows multiracial identification and provides a simple way to bridge past and current data. To create racial groups that are comparable to past data, the researcher can allocate multiracial individuals to the single race they select. States are required to keep track of vital statistics for their populations, and the federal government compiles this information into national vital statistics.
These data include information on births, marriages, divorces, deaths, and fetal deaths. These data are used to create fundamental statistics such as the average life expectancy in the United States and infant mortality information.
This information is often broken down by race and ethnicity, providing a wealth of information about basic health inequalities. The data are especially useful because they are available for small geographical units and available over a long period of time. Because the states are the first collectors of vital statistics, there is variation in how these records are kept. However, national standards provide a guideline that states are encouraged to follow. For example, a national standard death certificate can be used or adapted by states, so most states have similar forms.
These forms usually have separate Hispanic ethnicity and race questions, similar to the Census. Although vital statistics are essential to understanding health in the United States, they also suffer from one of the most well-known problems with respect to racial and ethnic identification.
Documentation has clearly shown that mortality rates, especially for smaller groups, are flawed partly because of the way in which race and ethnicity are recorded on death certificates. This means that births, where the race of the child is usually identified by the parent, do not match with deaths, where the race of the deceased may be identified by a stranger. The National Mortality Follow-Back Surveys NMFS of and provided some opportunities to investigate the implications of the misreporting of racial and ethnic group membership on the death certificates Hahn, ; Swallen and Guend, Each NMFS was based on a national sample of death certificates.
The NMFS contacted next of kin and hospital personnel to verify information on the death certificates. This created the opportunity for researchers to compare the racial and ethnic identification on the death certificate provided by whoever completed the death certificate at the time of death with the information provided by next of kin. The results show, for example, that while 86 percent of white Hispanics were classified correctly on the death certificates, only 54 percent of black Hispanics were classified correctly.
Swallen and Guend adjust the life expectancies at birth e 0 for black and white Hispanics for these misclassifications. The life expectancies for black Hispanic males drops from The reasons for these drops are clear: The current method of identifying race and ethnicity on the death certificates undercounts black Hispanic deaths, leading to an overestimation of life expectancy for this group. Swallen and Guend also find that these adjustments are more important for Hispanics than for non-Hispanics, but also more important for black Hispanics than for white Hispanics.
The unadjusted life expectancy at birth for white Hispanic men is The black advantage among Hispanic men goes from nearly 12 years in the unadjusted rates to less than 2 years in the adjusted rates. It is also important to note that other data quality problems can significantly affect our understanding of racial and ethnic differences in health. Elo and Preston , for example, note that racial differences in age misreporting significantly affect comparisons of white and black mortality at older ages.
The types of data we have reviewed here have several limitations for the study of racial and ethnic differences in health. Williams, Lavizzo-Mourey, and Warren review a number of these limitations. The first obvious weakness is that most of the large national surveys do not allow the researcher to examine subgroups within the major racial and ethnic groups.
With the exception of surveys such as the HHANES, most data sources regularly used to examine the health characteristics of Americans are national samples with sample sizes too small to allow the specification of subgroups.
The major panethnic categories used by researchers, however, contain such significant variation within them that it is difficult to draw useful conclusions about the population. We generally lack data on specific nationality groups for Asian Americans, for example, and yet we can be fairly sure that Japanese Americans and Vietnamese Americans will have significant differences in their health outcomes because there are such sizable differences in their class status.
Similarly, Hispanics come from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds, and it is unreasonable to assume that early Cuban-American immigrants will have the same health characteristics as recent Mexican-American arrivals. Asian Americans and Hispanics are therefore most difficult to study using national data sources because their groups are both numerically small and very diverse. Therefore, most of the studies of the health of these subgroups do not come from these national data sets, but from state health surveys in states such as Hawaii, California, and Florida.
Figure illustrates the type of information that is generally available in government publications Federal Interagency Forum on Aging Related Statistics, This information is based on averaging over 3 years of data from the NHIS for the population aged 65 and older.
An advantage of these data is that the numerator and the denominator are calculated using the same individuals. These data show that during the period, 74 percent of non-Hispanic whites, These differences reveal continuing health disparities among the elderly for blacks, whites, and Hispanics. Unfortunately, they also disguise a good deal of heterogeneity within these groups.
The Hispanic group consists of more than 25 national origin groups with wide variation in health status Sorlie, Backlund, Johnson, and Rogot, ; Vega and Amaro, ; Williams, African American health status also varies with socioeconomic status, region of birth within the United States, generation in the United States, and country of origin for recent immigrants from the Caribbean Williams, Percentage of persons aged 65 or older who reported good to excellent health, to There are exceptions to this, of course, including the current NHIS and Census, so these sources need to be studied to see how multiracial identification might change our understanding of racial and ethnic health disparities.
Currently, however, the multiracial population of the United States is overwhelmingly a young one, so this limitation should have a limited impact on studies of the health of the elderly see, for example, Root, Finally, death certificates greatly undercount the number of deaths for some racial and ethnic groups, and overcount deaths for other racial groups, because the observers identifying the race and ethnicity of the deceased identify them differently than they were identified in the Census.
This draws our attention to the important fact that racial and ethnic identification can depend on who is identifying the individual. This is an important idea to bear in mind, especially when the source of the identification is different across data sets. We give one final illustration of the problems created by our current data collection and health surveillance systems. Figure contains information on the and age-adjusted death rates due to stroke that come from Keppel, Pearcy, and Wagener According to these statistics, the highest death rate due to stroke is among blacks and the lowest is among Hispanics.
However, as the authors of the report note, these death rates make no adjustments for the poor reporting of race and ethnicity on the death certificates. The Hispanic death rate due to stroke is undoubtedly higher than that reported in Figure Furthermore, the nature of the Hispanic population changed considerably between and due to immigration, and these statistics do not provide information separately by nativity or year of arrival. The Hispanic figures also disguise a good deal of heterogeneity across the different countries of origin of individuals within this category.
Age-adjusted death rates due to stroke by race and Hispanic origin. Our review of how we collect data on racial and ethnic groups suggests that in some ways an accurate picture of racial and ethnic disparities in health will remain elusive. This is because societal definitions of racial and ethnic group membership as well as individuals’ perceptions of their own racial and ethnic identities change over time.
Furthermore there is a great deal of heterogeneity within racial and ethnic categories, including nationality subgroups, generation, language usage, and socioeconomic status. Only recently— in the U. Census—have we permitted individuals to select their own race and ethnicity.
Only in the Census were individuals permitted to select more than one racial identity. Research suggests that this change will have different effects on the elderly and young populations; for example, many older blacks of mixed racial descent do not identify themselves as such now because they never had the option in the past Korgen, Information on mortality for Native Americans has generally been confined to Indian Health Service reports, not nationally representative data.
This greatly restricts our understanding of historical trends in morbidity disparities. We know from some analyses of morbidity and mortality that statistics for these umbrella groups are misleading and disguise a good deal of variability within the groups.
Health disparities vary with socioeconomic status within all of these umbrella groups. The picture would be more understandable if we looked at more detailed subgroups, including those differentiated by national origin, generation in the United States, and socioeconomic status.
However, such differentiation is not always feasible with population-based survey data that sample enough cases to analyze Asians and Hispanics but not enough to examine specific origin groups or distinguish between the native born and the foreign born.
The ways in which we measure racial and ethnic identity have important implications for our understanding of racial and ethnic disparities in health among the elderly. Health outcomes might be influenced by both the racial and ethnic self-identification of individuals, and the discriminatory actions of others. The effects of discrimination on health occur because of how other people view an individual, which may or may not correspond with how an individual sees himself or herself.
Nonetheless, it is clear that self-identification is the best way for gathering information about racial and ethnic identity. It gives people the opportunity to express how they see themselves, and it allows for greater consistency across data sources because most surveys use some form of self-identification. The Centers for Disease Control now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention endorsed self-identification as the most desirable method for using race and ethnicity in public health surveillance Centers for Disease Control, In addition, observer identification of race and ethnicity is heavily influenced by characteristics of the observer and context Harris, , so there is no consistent way to evaluate an individual’s observed race in survey settings.
There are also good reasons to believe that self-identified race and ethnicity would have significant impacts on health outcomes. First, self-identification has an important influence on the self-selected peer group and community, which can in turn have meaningful effects on the availability of health services and an individual’s tendency to utilize those services.
Second, self-identification is related to the choice of media and cultural outlets, and these sources may contain messages about health behaviors such as smoking, eating habits, or visiting doctors.
Finally, self-identification is often influenced by observer identifications, and so can also serve as a proximate measure of how others racially classify an individual. The results of Census suggested that at this point in time a small minority of Americans took advantage of an opportunity to identify themselves as members of more than one racial or ethnic group a U.
As the social science work on racial and ethnic identification and the biological work showing little evidence of biological racial groups become more widely disseminated, Americans may move to what Hirschman and colleagues refer to as an origins-based self-identification system.
However, as these authors and other authors point out, Americans still see African Americans as somehow different from other racial and ethnic groups Cornell and Hartmann, ; Waters, African Americans have the fewest ethnic options of any group in the United States.
Changes in measurement over time, therefore, will have a greater impact on some groups than others. The battles that led up to the Census illustrate the political problems that arise over efforts to modify racial and ethnic classification schemes. The fact that there is no scientific basis for preferring a particular set of categories makes the political issues even more intractable.
One can compare this to the issue of adjusting results based on sampling. Here there are statistical theoretical reasons for arguing that such adjustments are appropriate. These become influential, although not conclusive, in the political debate. When we are looking at racial and ethnic classification schemes, there is no established theoretical perspective that suggests some schemes are better than others, and the scientific debates are largely confined to comparability issues wanting to study trends over time, compare groups across studies, or ensure that the denominator includes all of the people in the numerator when computing rates based on two different data sets.
Nonetheless, what we have learned up to this point suggests the following:. Work on this chapter was supported by funds provided to the Wisconsin Center for the Demography of Health and Aging by the National Institute of Aging. A number of related issues are outside the scope of this chapter. Furthermore, we do not look at the roles of prejudice and discrimination in the differential treatment of individuals by the health care system.
The major exception to the use of self-identification in classifying individuals is the death certificate, in which someone who is generally not a member of the deceased’s family, often a funeral home director, assigns racial and ethnic identity, sometimes without any consultation with family members. The social constructionist model will be described further in this chapter. Race questions employed by the Census will be discussed further in this chapter.
Nonetheless, it provides intriguing information about how people respond to alternative questions about racial and Hispanic identity. For a detailed discussion of the ways in which the social construction of racial and ethnic groups takes place, see Cornell and Hartmann An example of the former would be the use of Hindu and quadroon as common racial terms earlier in U. An example of the latter would be someone with some Asian and some white ancestry changing their racial identification from white to Asian or biracial.
Snipp provides a helpful summary of the history of Native American classification. However, some of those included in this statistic are possibly multiracial themselves. Turn recording back on. Help Accessibility Careers. Search term. Gary D. Sandefur, Mary E. Campbell, and Jennifer Eggerling-Boeck Our picture of racial and ethnic disparities in the health of older Americans is strongly influenced by the methods of collecting data on race and ethnicity.
African Americans As mentioned, the African American racial category has relatively rigid boundaries in U. Asian Americans Any examination of racial identity among Asian Americans must be informed by an awareness of important subgroup differences.
Native Americans Racial identity is also a complex issue for Native Americans. Summary Existing evidence on racial and ethnic identity suggests that the early 21st century is a time of changing notions of racial and ethnic identity as immigration continues to fuel the growth of the Asian and Hispanic populations, as intermarriage rates continue to increase, and as the federal government begins to take into account the implications of mixed racial heritage or origins.
The Decennial Census Despite its limited measures of health and aging, changes in the Census will affect our understanding of health for two reasons. Vital Statistics Data States are required to keep track of vital statistics for their populations, and the federal government compiles this information into national vital statistics.
Implications for Health Outcomes The ways in which we measure racial and ethnic identity have important implications for our understanding of racial and ethnic disparities in health among the elderly. Nonetheless, what we have learned up to this point suggests the following: Self-identification should be the standard method of collecting racial and ethnic information.
In the case of death certificates, race and ethnicity should always be determined by asking the next of kin or someone familiar with the individual. This would bring data collection efforts into line with what most other federal agencies do in this area. People should not be constrained to choose only one group; they should be permitted to choose as many as they wish.
This again is in the spirit of the CDC recommendation of relying on self-identification, and would bring other data collection efforts in line with the Census and the NHIS. Researchers would then have the option of collapsing more detailed categories in various ways. The race and Hispanic questions should be combined into an origins question. Sampling designs that attempt to oversample specific Asian or Hispanic subgroups are better than those that attempt to oversample the generic Asian or Hispanic categories.
Racial theories. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press; Centers for Disease Control. Use of race and ethnicity in public health surveillance. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Cornell S. Land, labour and group formation: Blacks and Indians in the United States.
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Social Science Quarterly. Changes in racial identification and the educational attainment of American Indians, Espiritu YL. Asian American panethnicity: Bridging institutions and identities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Farley R. Identifying with multiple races: A social movement that succeeded but failed? Older Americans Key indicators of well-being.
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Portes A, MacLeod D. What shall I call myself? An additional 9 percent were classified as Dominican and Other Hispanic or Latino. American Indians and Alaska Natives The participation rate for Asians was Among adult men 20 years and older in the largest race and ethnicity groups, Hispanics The labor force participation rate for Asian men Among adult women 20 years and older , Blacks Among teenagers 16 to 19 years , Asians See table 3.
The employment—population ratio the proportion of the population that is employed ranged from The employment—population ratio was Black men The employment—population ratios for Asian men and White men were Among adult women, the ratios showed less variation across the major race and ethnicity groups: The employment—population ratio among teenagers 16 to 19 years continued to be higher for Whites than for Hispanics, Asians, or Blacks.
The ratio for White teens Among people 25 years and older, the share of the labor force with at least a high school diploma was more than 90 percent each for Whites, Blacks, and Asians. Seventy-six percent of Hispanics in the labor force had attained at least a high school diploma.
Higher levels of education are generally associated with a greater likelihood of employment, and a lower likelihood of unemployment. See table 6. Individuals with higher levels of education are more likely to be employed in higher paying jobs—such as those in management, professional, and related occupations—than are individuals with less education.
Median earnings of people 25 years and older increased with educational attainment across all major race and ethnicity groups.
See table Fifty-four percent of employed Asians worked in management, professional, and related occupations—the highest paying major occupational category—compared with 41 percent of employed Whites, 31 percent of employed Blacks, and 22 percent of employed Hispanics. See table 7 and chart 3. Among employed men, 55 percent of Asians worked in management, professional, and related occupations, compared with 37 percent of Whites, 26 percent of Blacks, and 19 percent of Hispanics.
About 20 percent of employed Black and Hispanic men were employed in service occupations, whereas 13 percent of both employed Asian and White men worked in these occupations. Employed Black and Hispanic men also were more likely than White and Asian men to work in production, transportation, and material moving occupations.
Twenty-eight percent of employed Hispanic men worked in natural resources, construction, and maintenance occupations, compared with 18 percent of White men, 12 percent of Black men, and 6 percent of Asian men. See table 7. Employed Asian women were more likely than other employed women to work in management, professional, and related occupations: 53 percent of Asian women, compared with 45 percent of White women, 36 percent of Black women, and 27 percent of Hispanic women.
Among employed women, 61 percent of Hispanics worked in two occupational groups—service occupations and sales and office occupations—compared with 55 percent of Blacks, 48 percent of Whites, and 41 percent of Asians. Hispanics accounted for 17 percent of total employment but were substantially overrepresented in several detailed occupational categories, including painters, construction and maintenance 55 percent ; miscellaneous agricultural workers 53 percent ; and maids and housekeeping cleaners 49 percent.
Blacks made up 12 percent of all employed workers, but accounted for more than one-quarter of those in several specific occupations, including nursing, psychiatric, and home health aides 36 percent ; security guards and gaming surveillance officers 31 percent ; and licensed practical and licensed vocational nurses 30 percent.
Asians accounted for 6 percent of all employed workers, but made up a much larger share of workers in several occupation categories, including miscellaneous personal appearance workers 57 percent ; software developers, applications and system software 35 percent ; and physicians and surgeons 20 percent.
Whites made up 78 percent of all employed people, but accounted for 96 percent of farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural managers; 92 percent of construction managers; and 90 percent of chief executives. See table 8. Among employed men, Hispanics were more likely to work in the construction industry 21 percent than were Whites 14 percent , Blacks 7 percent , or Asians 4 percent.
Employed Black men were more likely than employed men of other race and ethnicity groups to work in transportation and utilities 13 percent. Twenty-one percent of employed Asian men worked in professional and business services, higher than the shares of White men 13 percent , Hispanic men 11 percent , and Black men 11 percent. A large share of employed women across all race and ethnicity groups worked in education and health services: Blacks 40 percent , Whites 36 percent , Asians 32 percent , and Hispanics 30 percent.
See table 9. Eighty-eight percent of both Asian families and Hispanic families had an employed family member. By contrast, White and Black families were less likely to have an employed family member: 80 percent and 79 percent, respectively. Families maintained by women no opposite-sex spouse present accounted for 42 percent of Black families, 25 percent of Hispanic families, 15 percent of White families, and 12 percent of Asian families.
Among families maintained by women without a spouse present, Asian families were the most likely to have an employed family member 85 percent.
In comparison, 76 percent of Black families, 78 percent of White families, and 80 percent of Hispanic families that were maintained by women had at least one employed family member.
In general, families maintained by women were less likely than married-couple families or families maintained by men to have an employed family member. Among mothers with children under 18 years old, Black mothers Across all race and ethnicity groups, fathers with children under 18 years were much more likely to be in the labor force than were mothers with children under 18 years.
Labor force participation rates for these fathers were Jobless rates varied considerably by race and ethnicity. American Indians and Alaska Natives 6. The jobless rates were 3. Among adults 20 years and older , the jobless rate for Black men 6.
By contrast, adult Hispanic men 3. For Asians and Whites, the rates for adult men and women showed little or no difference. Among teenagers 16 to 19 years , Blacks had the highest unemployment rate, at Unemployed Asians and Blacks experienced longer periods of unemployment than did Whites and Hispanics. The median duration of unemployment for Asians and Blacks was Of the 6.
Reentrants to the labor force 31 percent , job leavers 13 percent , and new entrants 10 percent accounted for the rest of the unemployed people. Of the total unemployed for each major race and ethnicity group, 49 percent of Whites and 49 percent of Hispanics were job losers, compared with 46 percent of Blacks and 38 percent of Asians. Sixteen percent of unemployed Asians, 12 percent of unemployed Hispanics, 11 percent of unemployed Blacks, and 8 percent of unemployed Whites were new entrants to the labor force.
As computed from table 15, Blacks made up 13 percent of the civilian labor force, and 23 percent of people marginally attached to the labor force. Those marginally attached to the labor force are individuals who.
Hispanics and Asians were represented among the marginally attached nearly proportionately to their share of the labor force. Whites were underrepresented among the marginally attached relative to their share of the labor force: 78 percent of the labor force versus 67 percent of the marginally attached.
Blacks also made up a high proportion of discouraged workers 27 percent relative to their share of the labor force. Discouraged workers, who represent a subset of the marginally attached, are people not currently looking for work because they believe that no jobs are available for them. Among the major race and ethnicity groups, Hispanics and Blacks continued to have considerably lower earnings than Whites and Asians.
These earnings comparisons are on a broad level and do not control for many factors that can be significant in explaining earnings differences, such as job skills and responsibilities, work experience, and specialization. The earnings disparity across the major race and ethnicity groups for men holds for nearly all major occupational groups.
Median weekly earnings for women by race and ethnicity groups were relatively close across a number of occupations. By contrast, in management, professional, and related occupations, the earnings of Asian women were higher than those for women in other race and ethnicity groups.
Share of U.S. population and , by race and Hispanic origin | Statista.
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Demographics of the United States. Demographic history. Identity and ethnogenesis. Consociationalism Cultural appropriation Diaspora politics Dominant minority Ethnic democracy Ethnic enclave Ethnic interest group Ethnic majority Ethnic media Ethnic nationalism Ethnic pornography Ethnic theme park Ethnoburb Ethnocracy Ethnopluralism Ethnographic film Ethnographic village Indigenous rights Middleman minority Minority rights Model minority Multinational state.
Ideology and ethnic conflict. Namespaces Article Talk. Views Read Edit View history. Help Learn to edit Community portal Recent changes Upload file. Download as PDF Printable version. Wikimedia Commons. This article is part of a series on the. History Language People race and ethnicity Religion. Hispanic and Latino. This situation is further complicated by the many ways in which Native American identity can be defined.
There are widespread ambiguities and disputes about who is an Indian, how many American Indians there are in the United States, who should be permitted to assert Indian ethnicity, and who has the right to represent Indian interests. These definitions can be at odds with state, tribal, and individual definitions of who qualifies as Native American. In order to receive federal services, Indian tribes must be federally recognized.
Lack of tribal recognition denies tribal members official Native American status in the view of the federal government. Tribal definitions of Native American identity vary widely in their required blood quantum.
Of course, the Census and most surveys measure race by self-identification, so individuals not considered Native American in the previous cases would be counted as Native American in these surveys. American Indians have racially intermarried at even greater rates than Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans. Nagel describes the ethnic renewal of American Indians in the latter half of the 20th century.
Part of this renewal was the shifting of racial identities of multiracial persons with American Indian ancestry from a racial identification with their other ancestry group usually white to a racial identification as Native American. As the social and political atmosphere of the United States made American Indian identity more attractive, the numbers of those choosing this identity grew. Eschbach, Supple, and Snipp found that more highly educated persons living in cities were more likely to shift to a Native American identity in the Census.
Self-identification shifts such as these can initially create apparent improvements in the demographic characteristics of Native Americans as a group.
When analyzing longitudinal data on outcomes such as income, education, and health, researchers should consider possible identity shifts. Existing evidence on racial and ethnic identity suggests that the early 21st century is a time of changing notions of racial and ethnic identity as immigration continues to fuel the growth of the Asian and Hispanic populations, as intermarriage rates continue to increase, and as the federal government begins to take into account the implications of mixed racial heritage or origins.
As the previous discussion shows, the way in which Americans have seen themselves and one another has been influenced by the federal racial and ethnic classification schemes. At the same time, these classification schemes have responded to changes in how people identify themselves and others.
The changes between the and Censuses are only the more recent examples of these shifts. Next we review the racial and ethnic classification schemes employed by some of the largest federal data sets used to study racial and ethnic disparities in the health of the aging population. Although we discuss only a few of the major data sets, this will help us to understand the limitations of the available data for the study of these complex racial and ethnic identities.
What we know about racial and ethnic differences in health is, of course, largely driven by the kind of racial and ethnic data available. There are many sources of information about health, so it would be impossible to discuss all the intricacies of how racial and ethnic data are collected for health surveys.
However, a few major federal data collection efforts are very important in their own right, and have a significant impact on how other surveys collect racial and ethnic data. For this reason, it is important to examine how the largest federal data sets measure race and ethnicity. Despite its limited measures of health and aging, changes in the Census will affect our understanding of health for two reasons. First, the Census provides one of the largest data sets available to researchers, which allows panethnic groups to be broken down into subgroups, such as nationality groups.
Thus, we must rely on the Census for our information about some of the smallest groups. Second, many other large surveys look to the Census and the guidelines set by OMB to decide how to frame their own race and ethnicity items, so changes in the Census often affect many other surveys. As noted earlier, the Census permitted individuals to identify with more than one racial group. This change could have a significant effect on health statistics for some groups because it is clear from early results that some groups have a much higher percentage of multiracial individuals than others.
In other words, groups such as American Indians and Asian Americans are likely to have a much higher percentage of their population switch to a multiracial identity than African Americans or whites.
This will change our understanding of racial differences in health to the degree that these multiracial individuals differ from the monoracial groups they were selecting before. Older people were less likely than younger people to be affected by this change. Table contains some information on the racial composition of the population of different ages from Census These figures illustrate the well-known fact that the population of individuals 65 and older is less diverse than the younger population.
More importantly for our purposes, the results show that the percentage of people who report or are reported as being of two or more races declines consistently as we move upward through the age groups. Hispanic identity has been and continues to be measured in a question separate from racial identification.
Individuals were constrained to choose only one Hispanic group in the Hispanic identification question although they could include multiple identities in the question about ancestry b U. Bureau of the Census, b. Hirschman and colleagues argue convincingly that there is little reason to keep the Hispanic origin and race questions separate. In fact, there are good reasons for putting them together. The results from the Race and Ethnic Targeted Test RAETT laid out by Hirschman and colleagues showed that the percentage of individuals who did not respond to the question about race declined significantly when the Hispanic and race questions were combined into an origins question and people were allowed to select more than one group.
They argue that the concept of origins seems to be closer to how most Americans think about diversity than the old concepts of race and ethnicity. One issue raised by combining the race and Hispanic questions is whether this affects our ability to identify and study black Hispanics. Many Americans regard substantial numbers of Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Hispanics from other countries of origin in Central and South America as black.
Black Hispanics are of interest to social scientists and to those who are interested in monitoring health because they represent an interesting combination of ascribed statuses. We do not know to what extent those who are seen as black Hispanics by Americans and thus by social scientists necessarily see themselves in the same way; they may identify more as black or more as Hispanic.
Consequently, all we can do is compare the results of various forms of self-identification, including the old way of forcing a choice of race followed by a choice of Hispanic origin, the Census way of forcing a choice of Hispanic origin followed by allowing people to choose more than one racial category, or the Hirschman and colleagues proposal to combine the two questions and allow individuals to choose more than one.
Table shows the percentage of individuals who identified as both black and Hispanic in the Census, the Census, and in the combined panel with the option of choosing more than one response in the RAETT. In , 3. In the Census, 2 percent of the Hispanic population was recorded as black, Bureau of the Census, a. In the combined question used in the RAETT, approximately 75 percent of Hispanics identified themselves as Hispanic only, while 0.
The next most common category was white and Hispanic. Most importantly, the percentage of individuals who do not respond to the race question is reduced dramatically by using a combined question, especially among Hispanics. The best we can hope for, and what we should try for, is a count that represents how people see themselves. Racial Distribution of the Hispanic Population percentage. Information on the racial and ethnic characteristics of the respondents comes from the home interview.
Then respondents are asked to self-identify with one of the major racial categories. Many of the results of the NHANES that are reported are still limited to reports of only whites, blacks, and Mexican Americans because of constraints of the sample size. The goal of this survey was to provide a sample large enough about 16, to allow estimation of the health of Hispanics in general, as well as of specific groups such as Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, and Puerto Ricans.
To do this, the NHANES instrument was adapted in small ways such as the addition of an acculturation scale and translated into Spanish so respondents could choose to participate in Spanish or English. The Mexican-American sample comes from selected counties in five southwestern states 14 with a sample size of 9, In all areas, all Hispanics were asked to complete the survey, so there are small numbers of Hispanic respondents from other groups.
The health outcomes of Hispanics might be different in areas where they are much less concentrated, an issue that cannot be addressed with HHANES data. The survey, also run by the National Center for Health Statistics, is designed to cover basic health and demographic items, with supplements for specific health topics. The NHIS has been interviewing households since , and is a continuous cross-sectional survey. An important change for researchers interested in racial and ethnic differences was the addition in of a detailed breakdown for Asian American groups.
Since , information has been available for nine Asian subgroups, and this information can be used to study these groups if the data are pooled over years to achieve a sample of sufficient size. Once OMB released its new guidelines for collecting racial and ethnic data in federal surveys, the NHIS race and ethnicity questions were revised. Since , the NHIS has asked four questions about race and ethnicity. Respondents are asked if they identify as Hispanic, and those who do are asked to select a specific Hispanic origin group.
This format is particularly useful to researchers because it allows multiracial identification and provides a simple way to bridge past and current data. To create racial groups that are comparable to past data, the researcher can allocate multiracial individuals to the single race they select. States are required to keep track of vital statistics for their populations, and the federal government compiles this information into national vital statistics. These data include information on births, marriages, divorces, deaths, and fetal deaths.
These data are used to create fundamental statistics such as the average life expectancy in the United States and infant mortality information. This information is often broken down by race and ethnicity, providing a wealth of information about basic health inequalities. The data are especially useful because they are available for small geographical units and available over a long period of time. Because the states are the first collectors of vital statistics, there is variation in how these records are kept.
However, national standards provide a guideline that states are encouraged to follow. For example, a national standard death certificate can be used or adapted by states, so most states have similar forms. These forms usually have separate Hispanic ethnicity and race questions, similar to the Census. Although vital statistics are essential to understanding health in the United States, they also suffer from one of the most well-known problems with respect to racial and ethnic identification.
Documentation has clearly shown that mortality rates, especially for smaller groups, are flawed partly because of the way in which race and ethnicity are recorded on death certificates. This means that births, where the race of the child is usually identified by the parent, do not match with deaths, where the race of the deceased may be identified by a stranger.
The National Mortality Follow-Back Surveys NMFS of and provided some opportunities to investigate the implications of the misreporting of racial and ethnic group membership on the death certificates Hahn, ; Swallen and Guend, Each NMFS was based on a national sample of death certificates. The NMFS contacted next of kin and hospital personnel to verify information on the death certificates. This created the opportunity for researchers to compare the racial and ethnic identification on the death certificate provided by whoever completed the death certificate at the time of death with the information provided by next of kin.
The results show, for example, that while 86 percent of white Hispanics were classified correctly on the death certificates, only 54 percent of black Hispanics were classified correctly. Swallen and Guend adjust the life expectancies at birth e 0 for black and white Hispanics for these misclassifications. The life expectancies for black Hispanic males drops from The reasons for these drops are clear: The current method of identifying race and ethnicity on the death certificates undercounts black Hispanic deaths, leading to an overestimation of life expectancy for this group.
Swallen and Guend also find that these adjustments are more important for Hispanics than for non-Hispanics, but also more important for black Hispanics than for white Hispanics. The unadjusted life expectancy at birth for white Hispanic men is The black advantage among Hispanic men goes from nearly 12 years in the unadjusted rates to less than 2 years in the adjusted rates. It is also important to note that other data quality problems can significantly affect our understanding of racial and ethnic differences in health.
Elo and Preston , for example, note that racial differences in age misreporting significantly affect comparisons of white and black mortality at older ages. The types of data we have reviewed here have several limitations for the study of racial and ethnic differences in health.
Williams, Lavizzo-Mourey, and Warren review a number of these limitations. The first obvious weakness is that most of the large national surveys do not allow the researcher to examine subgroups within the major racial and ethnic groups.
With the exception of surveys such as the HHANES, most data sources regularly used to examine the health characteristics of Americans are national samples with sample sizes too small to allow the specification of subgroups. The major panethnic categories used by researchers, however, contain such significant variation within them that it is difficult to draw useful conclusions about the population.
We generally lack data on specific nationality groups for Asian Americans, for example, and yet we can be fairly sure that Japanese Americans and Vietnamese Americans will have significant differences in their health outcomes because there are such sizable differences in their class status.
Similarly, Hispanics come from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds, and it is unreasonable to assume that early Cuban-American immigrants will have the same health characteristics as recent Mexican-American arrivals.
Asian Americans and Hispanics are therefore most difficult to study using national data sources because their groups are both numerically small and very diverse. Therefore, most of the studies of the health of these subgroups do not come from these national data sets, but from state health surveys in states such as Hawaii, California, and Florida. Figure illustrates the type of information that is generally available in government publications Federal Interagency Forum on Aging Related Statistics, This information is based on averaging over 3 years of data from the NHIS for the population aged 65 and older.
An advantage of these data is that the numerator and the denominator are calculated using the same individuals. These data show that during the period, 74 percent of non-Hispanic whites, These differences reveal continuing health disparities among the elderly for blacks, whites, and Hispanics.
Unfortunately, they also disguise a good deal of heterogeneity within these groups. The Hispanic group consists of more than 25 national origin groups with wide variation in health status Sorlie, Backlund, Johnson, and Rogot, ; Vega and Amaro, ; Williams, African American health status also varies with socioeconomic status, region of birth within the United States, generation in the United States, and country of origin for recent immigrants from the Caribbean Williams, Percentage of persons aged 65 or older who reported good to excellent health, to There are exceptions to this, of course, including the current NHIS and Census, so these sources need to be studied to see how multiracial identification might change our understanding of racial and ethnic health disparities.
Currently, however, the multiracial population of the United States is overwhelmingly a young one, so this limitation should have a limited impact on studies of the health of the elderly see, for example, Root, Finally, death certificates greatly undercount the number of deaths for some racial and ethnic groups, and overcount deaths for other racial groups, because the observers identifying the race and ethnicity of the deceased identify them differently than they were identified in the Census.
This draws our attention to the important fact that racial and ethnic identification can depend on who is identifying the individual. This is an important idea to bear in mind, especially when the source of the identification is different across data sets. We give one final illustration of the problems created by our current data collection and health surveillance systems.
Figure contains information on the and age-adjusted death rates due to stroke that come from Keppel, Pearcy, and Wagener According to these statistics, the highest death rate due to stroke is among blacks and the lowest is among Hispanics. However, as the authors of the report note, these death rates make no adjustments for the poor reporting of race and ethnicity on the death certificates.
The Hispanic death rate due to stroke is undoubtedly higher than that reported in Figure Furthermore, the nature of the Hispanic population changed considerably between and due to immigration, and these statistics do not provide information separately by nativity or year of arrival. The Hispanic figures also disguise a good deal of heterogeneity across the different countries of origin of individuals within this category.
Age-adjusted death rates due to stroke by race and Hispanic origin. Our review of how we collect data on racial and ethnic groups suggests that in some ways an accurate picture of racial and ethnic disparities in health will remain elusive. This is because societal definitions of racial and ethnic group membership as well as individuals’ perceptions of their own racial and ethnic identities change over time.
Furthermore there is a great deal of heterogeneity within racial and ethnic categories, including nationality subgroups, generation, language usage, and socioeconomic status. Only recently— in the U. Census—have we permitted individuals to select their own race and ethnicity. Only in the Census were individuals permitted to select more than one racial identity.
Research suggests that this change will have different effects on the elderly and young populations; for example, many older blacks of mixed racial descent do not identify themselves as such now because they never had the option in the past Korgen, Information on mortality for Native Americans has generally been confined to Indian Health Service reports, not nationally representative data. This greatly restricts our understanding of historical trends in morbidity disparities.
We know from some analyses of morbidity and mortality that statistics for these umbrella groups are misleading and disguise a good deal of variability within the groups. Health disparities vary with socioeconomic status within all of these umbrella groups. The picture would be more understandable if we looked at more detailed subgroups, including those differentiated by national origin, generation in the United States, and socioeconomic status. However, such differentiation is not always feasible with population-based survey data that sample enough cases to analyze Asians and Hispanics but not enough to examine specific origin groups or distinguish between the native born and the foreign born.
The ways in which we measure racial and ethnic identity have important implications for our understanding of racial and ethnic disparities in health among the elderly. Health outcomes might be influenced by both the racial and ethnic self-identification of individuals, and the discriminatory actions of others. The effects of discrimination on health occur because of how other people view an individual, which may or may not correspond with how an individual sees himself or herself.
Nonetheless, it is clear that self-identification is the best way for gathering information about racial and ethnic identity. It gives people the opportunity to express how they see themselves, and it allows for greater consistency across data sources because most surveys use some form of self-identification. The Centers for Disease Control now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention endorsed self-identification as the most desirable method for using race and ethnicity in public health surveillance Centers for Disease Control, In addition, observer identification of race and ethnicity is heavily influenced by characteristics of the observer and context Harris, , so there is no consistent way to evaluate an individual’s observed race in survey settings.
There are also good reasons to believe that self-identified race and ethnicity would have significant impacts on health outcomes. First, self-identification has an important influence on the self-selected peer group and community, which can in turn have meaningful effects on the availability of health services and an individual’s tendency to utilize those services.
Second, self-identification is related to the choice of media and cultural outlets, and these sources may contain messages about health behaviors such as smoking, eating habits, or visiting doctors. Finally, self-identification is often influenced by observer identifications, and so can also serve as a proximate measure of how others racially classify an individual.
The results of Census suggested that at this point in time a small minority of Americans took advantage of an opportunity to identify themselves as members of more than one racial or ethnic group a U. As the social science work on racial and ethnic identification and the biological work showing little evidence of biological racial groups become more widely disseminated, Americans may move to what Hirschman and colleagues refer to as an origins-based self-identification system.
However, as these authors and other authors point out, Americans still see African Americans as somehow different from other racial and ethnic groups Cornell and Hartmann, ; Waters, African Americans have the fewest ethnic options of any group in the United States. Changes in measurement over time, therefore, will have a greater impact on some groups than others. The battles that led up to the Census illustrate the political problems that arise over efforts to modify racial and ethnic classification schemes.
The fact that there is no scientific basis for preferring a particular set of categories makes the political issues even more intractable. One can compare this to the issue of adjusting results based on sampling.
Here there are statistical theoretical reasons for arguing that such adjustments are appropriate. These become influential, although not conclusive, in the political debate.
When we are looking at racial and ethnic classification schemes, there is no established theoretical perspective that suggests some schemes are better than others, and the scientific debates are largely confined to comparability issues wanting to study trends over time, compare groups across studies, or ensure that the denominator includes all of the people in the numerator when computing rates based on two different data sets.
Nonetheless, what we have learned up to this point suggests the following:. Work on this chapter was supported by funds provided to the Wisconsin Center for the Demography of Health and Aging by the National Institute of Aging. A number of related issues are outside the scope of this chapter.
Furthermore, we do not look at the roles of prejudice and discrimination in the differential treatment of individuals by the health care system. The major exception to the use of self-identification in classifying individuals is the death certificate, in which someone who is generally not a member of the deceased’s family, often a funeral home director, assigns racial and ethnic identity, sometimes without any consultation with family members.
The social constructionist model will be described further in this chapter. Race questions employed by the Census will be discussed further in this chapter. Nonetheless, it provides intriguing information about how people respond to alternative questions about racial and Hispanic identity. For a detailed discussion of the ways in which the social construction of racial and ethnic groups takes place, see Cornell and Hartmann An example of the former would be the use of Hindu and quadroon as common racial terms earlier in U.
An example of the latter would be someone with some Asian and some white ancestry changing their racial identification from white to Asian or biracial.
Snipp provides a helpful summary of the history of Native American classification. However, some of those included in this statistic are possibly multiracial themselves. Turn recording back on. Help Accessibility Careers. Search term. Gary D. Sandefur, Mary E. Campbell, and Jennifer Eggerling-Boeck Our picture of racial and ethnic disparities in the health of older Americans is strongly influenced by the methods of collecting data on race and ethnicity.
African Americans As mentioned, the African American racial category has relatively rigid boundaries in U. Asian Americans Any examination of racial identity among Asian Americans must be informed by an awareness of important subgroup differences. Native Americans Racial identity is also a complex issue for Native Americans. Summary Existing evidence on racial and ethnic identity suggests that the early 21st century is a time of changing notions of racial and ethnic identity as immigration continues to fuel the growth of the Asian and Hispanic populations, as intermarriage rates continue to increase, and as the federal government begins to take into account the implications of mixed racial heritage or origins.
The Decennial Census Despite its limited measures of health and aging, changes in the Census will affect our understanding of health for two reasons. Vital Statistics Data States are required to keep track of vital statistics for their populations, and the federal government compiles this information into national vital statistics.
Implications for Health Outcomes The ways in which we measure racial and ethnic identity have important implications for our understanding of racial and ethnic disparities in health among the elderly. Nonetheless, what we have learned up to this point suggests the following: Self-identification should be the standard method of collecting racial and ethnic information. In the case of death certificates, race and ethnicity should always be determined by asking the next of kin or someone familiar with the individual.
This would bring data collection efforts into line with what most other federal agencies do in this area. People should not be constrained to choose only one group; they should be permitted to choose as many as they wish.
This again is in the spirit of the CDC recommendation of relying on self-identification, and would bring other data collection efforts in line with the Census and the NHIS. Researchers would then have the option of collapsing more detailed categories in various ways. The race and Hispanic questions should be combined into an origins question. Sampling designs that attempt to oversample specific Asian or Hispanic subgroups are better than those that attempt to oversample the generic Asian or Hispanic categories.
Racial theories. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press; Centers for Disease Control. Use of race and ethnicity in public health surveillance. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Cornell S. Land, labour and group formation: Blacks and Indians in the United States. Ethnic and Racial Studies. Cornell S, Hartmann D. Ethnicity and race: Making identities in a changing world. Davis FJ. Who is black? One nation’s definition.
Division of Health Interview Statistics. NHIS Survey description. Mortality, race, and the family: Estimating African-American mortality from inaccurate data.
Eschbach K. Changing identification among American Indians and Alaska Natives. Eschbach K, Gomez C. Choosing Hispanic identity: Ethnic identity switching among respondents to high school and beyond. Social Science Quarterly. Changes in racial identification and the educational attainment of American Indians, Espiritu YL.
Asian American panethnicity: Bridging institutions and identities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Farley R. Identifying with multiple races: A social movement that succeeded but failed? Older Americans Key indicators of well-being. Washington, DC: Author; Hahn RA. The state of federal health statistics on racial and ethnic groups. Journal of the American Medical Association.
Harris DR. In the eye of the beholder: Observed race and observer characteristics. The meaning and measurement of race in the U. Census: Glimpses into the future.
Trends in racial and ethnic specific rates for the health status indicators, Healthy People Statistical Notes, No. Kibria N. Korgen KO. From black to biracial: Transforming racial identity among Americans.
Westport, CT: Praeger; Lee SM. Racial classifications in the U. Census: Maldonado L.
Most common race in america
About three-quarters of blacks and Asians (76% of each) – and 58% of Hispanics – say they have experienced discrimination or have been treated. The most prevalent racial or ethnic group for the United States was the White alone non-Hispanic population at %. In , the Black or African American alone population ( million) accounted for % of all people living in the United States, compared.
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