Race and Ethnicity

Source: National Association for Public Health Statistics and Information Systems

Race and Ethnicity Categories

1. Background Information and General Definition:

Race and ethnicity categories in the U.S. are defined by the Office of Management

and Budget (OMB), with the latest set based on a 1997 revision of a 1977 standard.

The minimum race categories and the exact wording for the 1997 OMB standards for

collecting data on race and ethnicity are:

1. American Indian or Alaska Native

2. Asian

3. Black or African American

4. Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander

5. White

The minimum ethnicity categories are:

1. Hispanic or Latino

2. Not Hispanic or Latino

The OMB standards allow for additional race categories to be collected, although

they must be additive (i.e., non-overlapping subcategories) within the minimum set of

race categories. Finally, the respondent instructions specify “Mark (X) one or more

races” to indicate what this person considers himself/herself to be, which allows for

multiple-race responses.

The U.S. 2003 revision of the standards for vital certificates recommends the

following race and ethnicity categories, which are in principle the same as those for

the 2000 decennial census, with minor wording changes. Both the 2003 vital

certificate standards and the 2000 decennial census questionnaires incorporated the

1997 revision of the OMB race and ethnicity category definitions, albeit the below go

well beyond the OMB minimum requirements.

1. Hispanic Origin

• No, not Spanish/Hispanic/Latino
• Yes, Mexican, Mexican American, Chicano
• Yes, Puerto Rican
• Yes, Cuban
• Yes, other Spanish/Hispanic/Latino (with space to write in group)

2. Race

• White
• Black or African American
• American Indian or Alaska Native (with space to write in principal tribe)
• Asian Indian
• Chinese
• Filipino
• Japanese
• Korean
• Vietnamese Other Asian (with space to write in race)
• Native Hawaiian
• Guamanian or Chamorro
• Samoan
• Other Pacific Islander (write in race)
• Other (write in race)

[...]

2. Common Usage (Purposes) in Vital Statistics:

The use of race and ethnicity categories is predominant vital statistics in several ways.

For example, the commonly cited measures of infant mortality rate, general fertility

rate and life expectancy are often disaggregated by race and/or ethnicity.

The idea and use of health disparities is most often based on differences in health

outcomes by race category. As such, several of CDC’s Healthy People objectives

focus on eliminating health disparities by race category.

Registration areas may collapse some of the collected race categories for tabulation

purposes. This could include, as an extreme example, “white” and “other.” It is

recommended that “other” include the names of the other race categories included

under this one name or at a minimum include the predominate race category within

“other” in the name (e.g., “Black or African American and all other races”).

Although, according to OMB, the concepts of race and ethnicity represent two

different dimensions of a population, they can be combined into categories such as

African American Non-Hispanic or white Hispanic for tabulation purposes. For

example, some of NCHS’s published tables combine these two dimensions in

reporting race and ethnicity data.

3. Technical Notes:

There are a few overarching points about OMB’s race and ethnicity categories that

should be kept in mind.

a. These are data collection and tabulation constructs. OMB has defined race

and ethnicity categories universally for federal government purposes. As

such, they do not represent or necessarily equate to other race category

classification systems or typologies, such as those based on genotype or

phenotype

b. The primary purpose for the federal government to collect race and

ethnicity category data is for enforcement and evaluation of laws prohibiting

discrimination based on race or ethnicity (i.e., civil rights monitoring and

enforcement, redistricting legislatures). This allows the federal government

to collect data and tabulate statistics by race and ethnicity in a consistent and

comparable manner, so as to permit meaningful measurement and to track

progress or regress.

c. Race and ethnicity data are based on self-reporting. Although the race and

ethnicity categories are explicitly defined by OMB, the respondents to Census

Bureau questionnaires and the informants for state vital certificates are free to

interpret the categories (and use their own mental templates of race and

ethnicity) and answer any way they see fit.

d. Tabulation categories are not universal. While the race and ethnicity

categories tabulated into statistics for civil rights monitoring and enforcement

purposes are defined by OMB, for all other purposes, including vital statistics,

it is generally discretionary (with certain restrictions for federal data,

especially regarding multiple-race responses) and to meet specific

programmatic needs.

Race or ethnicity categories sometimes are used in public health research as a proxy

for social dimensions, such as education and income. Naturally, such usages are

imperfect and go far beyond the original intentions of OMB.

Respondent variability regarding race categories is a well known phenomenon. That

is, an individual’s perception of race categories and how they would self-identify

relative to them can change over time for a variety of reasons.

Since the race of the newborn is not collected on the birth certificate and, for

reporting purposes, is based on the race of the mother, matching death certificates

with birth certificates (as commonly done for infant deaths) or conducting

longitudinal studies can be problematic for analysis of race/ethnicity.

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