When (In)Consistency Matters: Racial Identification and Specification

Abstract

Sociologists who rely on survey research have begun exploring the implications of racial inconsistency for not only multiracial identification but also for other social outcomes. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, the author explores the consequences of different specifications of race for modeling three outcomes: educational attainment, self-rated health, and interracial relationship history. The author uses the model-fit criteria of Akaike information criterion and Bayesian information criterion to compare five methods of classifying multiple, changed, and other-race respondents and of operationalizing heterogeneity among them. The results show substantial variation across outcomes in the specifications preferred and indications of a qualitative difference in the meaning of race for social contact versus for social stratification. The article concludes with recommendations for how quantitative researchers should measure race even when the categories primarily serve as covariates.

Black and Indigenous Inequality in Mexico: Implications for Multiracialism and Intersectionality Research

“…These findings should serve as a caution to scholars who use single or implicit dual-category approaches in their analyses of inequality. Our findings build on nascent conversations regarding how to account for multiraciality in analyses of inequality (Bratter 2018; Bratter and Gorman 2011; Campbell 2009; Shiao 2019) and contribute to understandings of how population growth can affect estimates of inequality, discussions which are increasingly relevant given the increase in minority and multiracial identification in many national contexts.…”

“…In the United States, much of the research on racial disparities and stratification overlooks multiracials. Some scholars omit them completely from analyses, while others collapse them into one of their (often nonwhite) parent categories, a single “best-race” category, or a broad “multiracial” category, oftentimes based on sample size and other logistical considerations (see Gullickson and Morning 2011; Kramer, Burke, and Charles 2015; Shiao 2019). A recent approach used in research on Latin America allows for overlap in racial categories by examining black disadvantage while controlling for indigenous identification (e.g., Torre-Cantalapiedra and Sánchez-Soto 2019; Villarreal and Bailey 2020).…”

“…A recent approach used in research on Latin America allows for overlap in racial categories by examining black disadvantage while controlling for indigenous identification (e.g., Torre-Cantalapiedra and Sánchez-Soto 2019; Villarreal and Bailey 2020). A final approach, for which we advocate in this article, is to explicitly separate out specific multiracial combinations in stratification analyses (Bratter and Gorman 2011; Campbell 2009; Kramer et al 2015; Shiao 2019; Villarreal and Bailey 2020).…”

“…A recent set of U.S.-based studies examines the important question of whether and how incorporating multiracials improves analyses of ethnoracial inequality (Bratter 2018; Bratter and Gorman 2011; Campbell 2009; Shiao 2019). In general, separating specific multiracial combinations into their own categories often nuances understandings of the degree of inequality and the mechanisms which reproduce it.…”

“…Mary E. Campbell’s (2009) study of educational inequality for single- versus multi-race individuals reveals that features like skin tone or racial appearance are not strongly associated with outcomes of multiracials (in contrast to monoracials), which suggests that different mechanisms may be driving the outcomes of single- versus multiple-category populations. Finally, the separate examination of multiracial individuals may have implications for the study of social networks and relations, as illustrated by Shiao (2019), who examines multiracial, changed, and other-race categories to predict interracial social contact.…”