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Observing race and ethnicity through a new lens: an exploratory analysis of different approaches to measuring “street race”
Observing race and ethnicity through a new lens: an exploratory analysis of different approaches to measuring “street race”
Survey questions about race and ethnicity can shed light on how experiences differ across groups and ultimately help policymakers and stakeholders address inequities in health and other outcomes. But such questions often focus only on self-identified race and ethnicity and lump together diverse populations, masking substantial differences within groups and yielding results with insufficient nuance to appropriately understand and address inequities. In this brief, we explore what we can learn by measuring race and ethnicity in alternative ways on surveys and what we miss by focusing only on one set of measures of race and ethnicity. We assess nonelderly adults’ perceptions of how others see their race based on their physical appearance (henceforth “street race”) and how responses to questions about street race vary depending on the response options given. To do so, we analyze data from the December 2021 round of the Urban Institute’s Well-Being and Basic Needs Survey (WBNS), a nationally representative, internet-based survey of adults ages 18 to 64.
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