Abstract
The 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth is among the few surveys to provide multiple reports on respondents’ race and ethnicity. Respondents were initially classified as Hispanic, black, or “other” on the basis of data collected during 1978 screener interviews. Respondents subsequently self-reported their “origin or descent” in 1979, and their race and Hispanic origin in 2002; the latter questions conform to the federal standards adopted in 1997 and used in the 2000 census. We use these data to (a) assess the size and nature of the multiracial population, (b) measure the degree of consistency among these alternative race-related variables, and (c) devise a number of alternative race/ethnicity taxonomies and determine which does the best job of explaining variation in log-wages. A key finding is that the explanatory power of race and ethnicity variables improves considerably when we cross-classify respondents by race and Hispanic origin. Little information is lost when multiracial respondents are assigned to one of their reported race categories because they make up only 1.3% of the sample.
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Notes
Additional changes made in 1997 include separating Asian and Pacific Islander (termed “Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander”) into at least two categories, and renaming the ethnicity categories “Hispanic or Latino” and “not Hispanic or Latino.”
When five races are used and respondents are allowed to select between one and five races, a maximum of 31 single- and multiple-race categories can be formed. When cross-classified with two ethnic categories, this yields a 62-category race/ethnicity taxonomy. The taxonomy grows to 126 categories when a sixth race code is added.
We lose a disproportionately small share of blacks and Hispanics because the disadvantaged non-Hispanic, nonblack oversample and the military oversample were dropped from the survey prior to 2002; these groups account for 2,722 of the 4,962 respondents lost to attrition. We assess inconsistencies in racial/ethnic reports separately for each race and ethnic group (Hispanics versus non-Hispanics), so nonrandom attrition affects our sample sizes but is not likely to distort our inferences.
Interviewers were instructed to read these categories to the respondent (excluding “refuse”) if the respondent did not provide an answer or the interviewer was unsure how to code the response.
See Center for Human Resource Research (2002) for additional details on the screener interviews and the creation of RACE78. The variable RACE78 is referred to in the NLSY79 database and documentation as “R’s racial/ethnic cohort from screener” (R02147), which is collapsed from the “sample identification code” (R01736).
A result of the NLSY79 sampling design is that whites and Asians are underrepresented. In contrast to the distribution in Table 2, the breakdown among 2000 census respondents choosing a single race is 75.1% white, 12.3% black, 3.7% Asian/Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, 0.9% American Indian, and 5.5% other (Grieco & Cassidy, 2001).
There are 13 cases of “disagreement” among the 134 respondents classified as Asian/Pacific Islander or multiracial. In 11 of these 13 cases, the respondent is identified as non-Hispanic by two of the ethnicity indicators.
Respondents may select multiple categories in 1979 as long as their responses fall into a single aggregate category, as defined in Table 1. If a respondent chooses English, German, and Irish as his “origin or descent,” for example, we classify him as white only.
The Table 7 subsample consists of respondents identified by HISP02 as non-Hispanic. Given the high rate of agreement among the Hispanic indicators, RACE78 and RACE79 are rarely coded as Hispanic.
It is unsurprising that less than 4% of the total log-wage variance is explained by these three race/ethnicity variables, given that richly-specified wage models typically produce a relatively modest R2 of about 0.20–0.30 when micro-data of this nature are used. Using NLSY79 data, Light and Strayer (2004) find that a detailed schooling taxonomy explains 10% of the total variance in log-wages, while the addition of a host of other regressors raises the R2 to 0.24.
Comparing specifications 5 and 5′ or 7b and 7b″ in Table 9, we see that the improvement is almost entirely due to dividing “whites” into two groups, although non-Hispanic whites still account for more than half of the unexplained variance in log-wages.
Of the 1,197 respondents in this group, almost 80% either chose “other” and one of the “white” categories (English, German, Greek, etc.) in 1979, or chose “American Indian” and a “white” category in 1979. While some of these individuals may have lost their multiracial identity between 1979 and 2002, it appears more likely that they chose “other” in 1979 because one of their countries of origin did not appear on the hand card, or that they chose American Indian in 1979 because they believed it meant American.
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Acknowledgment
We thank Rosella Gardecki, Steve McClaskie, and Karima Nagi for valuable input.
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Light, A., Nandi, A. Identifying race and ethnicity in the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Popul Res Policy Rev 26, 125–144 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-007-9021-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-007-9021-1