Impacts of Multiple Race Reporting on Rural Health Policy and Data Analysis. Working Paper Series No. 73

摘要

On October 30, 1997, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced the first revised federal standards for collecting data on race and ethnicity since 1977. The new policy requires that respondents be allowed to choose one or more race categories, as well as changing the content and naming of racial and ethnic categories. This policy change could alter the depiction of race in rural areas and subsequently affect race-specific rural health indicators and implementation of health programs important to rural areas, such as Health Professional Shortage Area designation and the Medicare Rural Hospital Flexibility Program. Data presented in the new format were first seen in the 2000 Census. The implementation of the new rule in Census 2000-allowing the choice of one or all of the required race categories plus 'Some Other Race'-yields 63 possible combinations of race classifications, as compared with the previous system, which had four races plus the optional 'Other Race' category. Only 2.43 percent of the American population reported more than one race (6,826,228 of 281,421,906 respondents). Of the 6,826,228 multiracial respondents, only 824,151 (12.07 percent) were from nonmetropolitan areas. Further, among the 54,539,232 total nonmetropolitan residents, only 1.51 percent selected more than one race. The nonmetropolitan residents of Hawaii, Alaska, and Oklahoma were the most likely to identify with more than one race and nonmetropolitan residents of Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina were the least likely to choose more than one race.