How Collection of Racial Demographics Highlights or Hides Participants’ Multiraciality: An Illustrative Example and Warning for Social Scientists

Abstract

Social scientists frequently rely on a single item to assess a participant's race, but this common practice can be misleading by obscuring the number of Multiracial participants in one’s sample. The current study reports descriptive statistics data from a multi-site sample of 688 diverse Multiracial college students (Mage = 21, range = 18–57, 73.1% female) to illustrate how different ways of collecting demographic information on race can shape researchers’ understanding and classification of Multiracial participants in their samples. Overall, 41.7% of participants in our sample would be classified differently (monoracial vs. Biracial vs. Multiracial) using participant-reported race compared to the race(s) of participants’ biological parents. We also find the proportion of Multiracial individuals that would be identified differently (e.g., put into a monoracial category vs. classified as Multiracial) differs based on various facets of Multiracial identity and several sociodemographic factors. Using self-reported versus parental race has substantial implications for how researchers classify and identify Multiracial participants in their samples.