OMB changes will impact Americans' racial and ethnic self-identification

A new study shows the updated questions will significantly reduce key minority population counts.

By Sarah Steimer

This spring, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget approved changes to the ethnic and racial self-identification questions used by all federal agencies, including the U.S. Census Bureau. The changes include merging the separate race and Hispanic ethnicity questions into a single combined question, along with adding a Middle Eastern and North African category. New research co-authored by René D. Flores, associate professor in the Department of Sociology, and published in Sociological Science, shows that the combined question reduces the percentage of Americans identifying as white or as some other race (SOR). The researchers, who also include UC Irvine sociologist Edward Telles and NORC research methodologist Ilana Ventura, found the key mechanism driving these effects was a tendency among Hispanics to decrease their identification in other categories when a Hispanic category is available in the combined question format. This leads to significant decreases in key minority populations, such as Afro-Latinos and indigenous Latinos.

Since 1980, government documents have included separate questions for Hispanic ethnicity and race self-identification. The idea was to allow respondents to identify ethnically as Hispanic and then choose a race in the separate race question — but many self-identified Hispanics did not know how to respond to the race question. 

“Most identify as white,” says Flores. “But a growing number identified as SOR. And under SOR, they would just write their national origin. They would say, ‘I'm Mexican,’ or ‘I’m Argentinian’ and the like — so this was a data quality issue for the Census.”

The solution to the problem isn’t quite as simple as updating the questions: Survey methodologists have previously found that changes in the format and phrasing of identity questions can alter individuals’ responses. Because changes to the OMB’s Statistical Policy Directive affect how all federal data on race and ethnicity are collected, altered responses can have major effects on political redistricting, congressional representation, resource allocation, academic research, consumer marketing, and more. Understanding this, the OMB called for “additional research, testing, (and) stakeholder engagement” to assess the impact of the approved changes on self-identification practices.

Among the scholars exploring the issue was the research team led by Flores. He and his co-authors focused on two questions: How do the proposed modifications affect Americans’ ethnoracial self-identification choices? And what are the likely mechanisms driving these effects?

“One concern that the Census had is that there's been an increasing number in SORs,” Flores says. “If you look across the last few census waves, more and more Americans are choosing SOR, as opposed to any of the other available racial categories. From the point of view of the census, this is a problem: SOR was never meant to be an actual racial category; it was meant to be just a residual category to catch the very few people that would not select the other categories.”

In the study, the team analyzed a nationally representative sample of 7,350 adult Americans to evaluate how the question changes impact responses. Participants were randomly assigned to answer either the existing separate race and ethnicity questions, or a combined question as proposed by the OMB.

They found that the combined question decreases the percentage of Americans identifying as white and as SOR. One of the driving factors for this effect was that, when given the combined self-identification question that lists Hispanic separately from categories such as white, African American, or American Indian, some Hispanics who previously identified with these other categories choose to identify solely as Hispanic. This reaction in turn led to statistically significant decreases in key minority populations, including Afro-Latinos and indigenous Latinos.

Flores and his coauthors theorize that this effect could be caused by a general tendency to select only one option in multiple-choice questions. Hispanics may also feel a stronger connection to national origin labels (such as Mexican or Cuban), which are listed under “Hispanic,” rather than to ethnoracial labels like Black, which may carry more stigma.

“Anytime you introduce a big change to your ethnoracial identification questions, this raises concerns about comparability: Significant changes, like those we document, make data over time less comparable as different people begin identifying with these labels,” Flores says. “In sociology, we don't think about ethnic or racial identification data as being incorrect or correct; it's always subjective.”

What this research really brings attention to, he says, “is how we need to think about the tools that we use to measure race and ethnicity more carefully, because we're capturing subjectivities, and our instruments may be affecting those subjectivities.”

Flores says that his perception is that there's been a push to roll out these survey question changes, but his team’s study shows that the changes are likely to affect identity data in ways that are still not fully understood. 

“These effects are pretty sizable, and our sample is not huge” he says. “Once you have a much bigger data set, the changes — if anything — will become more meaningful. Our research is really calling attention to the fact that these changes are pretty impactful, and we need to take a second and understand what's driving these changes before we fully roll them out.”