The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is working on a plan to update how the government collects information about race and ethnicity in the United States. Their goal is to better represent the diverse American population and simplify self‐reporting on forms and surveys.
Over the most recent decade, the U.S. Census Bureau finds that the population identifying as multiracial increased dramatically since 2010. Given substantial demographic change over past decades, the OMB contends that the current racial and ethnic reporting standards set by Statistical Policy Directive 15 (SPD15) in 1997 need updating.
In a recent Cato Briefing Paper, I use public data to model the proposed OMB categories and analyze each group’s demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. Below is a summary of my Cato brief. Please read the longer version for more details.
Background
The current standards ask about race and ethnicity in two separate questions, designed to provide a “minimum set” of categories that can be used consistently across different sources. This means that the categories must be detailed enough to allow respondents to best self‐report their background but broad enough to be compiled into a few consistent groups. The current categories are shown below.
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