Health & Medicine - Posted by Jessica Stark-Rice on Friday, April 22, 2011 10:50 - 2 Comments 
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(2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5) Loading ...Question of race does disservice
The limitations of questions about race on medical forms can create an inaccurate picture because respondents often identify with a race whose members are on average healthier than they are. (Credit: iStockphoto)
RICE (US) — Scores of people could be underserved by a medical health form question that many take for granted.
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The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
Medical forms that ask patients to identify themselves with a single race can alter patterns of racial health disparities because some multiracial adults identify with single-race groups whose health experience is different from their own, according to a new study.
Details are reported in the journal Demography.
Placing multiracial adults into single “best race” categories overshadows the poor health of groups such as American Indians when those adults identify with a race whose members are on average healthier, such as whites.
For example, multiracial adults who say “white” best describes themselves are 38 percent more likely than single-race whites to report their health as fair or poor.
“Subsuming these multiracial groups results in an apparent worsening of the overall health profile of whites, which provides the misimpression that the gap between white health and nonwhite health is closing,” says Jenifer Bratter, associate professor of sociology at Rice University.
“If we continue to lump multiracial groups under a single race, we’re losing valuable information about the serious health issues these subgroups are facing.”
Bratter and Bridget Gorman, associate professor of sociology, studied nearly 1.8 million cases, including data from more than 27,000 multiracial adults, from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) questionnaire.
The questionnaire asked respondents a standard set of questions about demographics, current health-related perceptions, conditions, and behaviors. Respondents were asked to first identify all races that applied to them, and then asked to choose the one that best represented them. They were also asked to rate their general health on a five-point scale, with one being “poor” and five “excellent.”
Racial and multiracial differences in self-rated health for the races was then assessed: white, black or African-American, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, American Indian, Alaska Native and other race.
Studies consistently find self-rated health to be a strong, independent predictor of morbidity and mortality; those who rate their health as poor experience a heightened risk of serious, life-threatening illness.
According to the new study, only 13.5 percent of whites report their health as fair to poor, compared with 24 percent of American Indians, 19.9 percent of blacks, and 18.4 percent of others. Single-race Asians were the least likely to report fair-to-poor health—only 8.7 percent did so.
While differences in self-rated health exist between single-race whites and multiracial whites, the percentage of single-race blacks who rated their health as fair to poor is nearly identical to that of multiracial blacks. The same is true for single-race and multiracial Asians.
“Our findings highlight the need for new approaches in understanding how race operates in a landscape where racial categories are no longer mutually exclusive yet racial inequality still exists,” says Bratter.
“This extends beyond health data to other measurements of well-being, income, poverty, and so much else.”
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2 Comments
amy
Karen
I like a survey where you can select all that apply, however, in many studies you just don’t have the sample size to look at multiracial people separately by their particular combination. Then you get the weirdness where many Hispanic/Latinos want to describe themselves at just that, but NIH defines that as ethnicity, not race. So you get people who fill in surveys saying they are Hispanic and don’t choose a race, or others who skip the ethnicity question. The standard survey for race and ethnicity also leaves out recent immigrants – African, not African American, for example. And I often wonder if people from the middle east self-identify as caucasian? Then differences among Asians….
so it ends up coming down to efficiency in most studies, which is too bad…
I’m always frustrated that ethicity is not included. There is rarely a category for Jewish even though it is an important factor when looking at risk for certain diseases.