Who Is Multiracial? Depends on How You Ask |
Who Is Multiracial? Depends on How You Ask
Pew Research Center
2015-11-06
Eileen Patten, Research Analyst
In 2014, as Pew Research Center prepared to conduct the first major study of the views of multiracial Americans—a group that, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, is poised to triple by 2060—we faced a fundamental and unavoidable methodological challenge: how to define and measure the concept “multiracial” in a public opinion survey context.
Racial identity is far from a straightforward concept, and when multiple strands of identity come together this has the potential to increase the complexity. An individual’s racial self-identity may take into account a range of factors beyond genealogy, including family ties, physical appearance, culture and how others perceive them. In other words, being multiracial is more than just a straightforward summation of the races in an individual’s family tree.
Consider, for example, a man whose mother is Asian and whose father is white. This may seem like someone who could easily be categorized as multiracial. But if this man was raised with little or no interaction with his white relatives or had experiences that were more closely aligned with those of the Asian community, he may well select “Asian” and nothing else when describing his race. Furthermore, some adults may have relatives of different races farther back in their family tree. While some people may think to include a more distant relative of a different race when asked about their racial background, others may not, even if they are aware of their family history.
With this in mind, we set out to test six different ways of defining a population of mixed-race adults to survey, using as our primary vehicle Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), a probability-based, nationally representative online panel of adults in the United States. We tested these different approaches with impaneled individuals who participated in more than one Pew Research Center survey, allowing us to examine how the same individual might have changed his or her responses depending on the question asked.
In this report, we share the results of these six survey experiments with a focus on the ways in which the different wordings of the stem, different response options and different modes used impacted the projected size of the U.S. multiracial population. We also look at the consistency in selecting two or more races across different measures at the individual level, as well as how estimates of specific subgroups of multiracial adults—most notably white and American Indian biracial adults—vary by question type…
Read the entire report here.
Tags: Eileen Patten, Pew Research Center