Poster #42 - How U.S. Adolescents Want to Be Measured: Demographic Questions and Implications for Youth Equity Research

• In Event: Friday Poster Reception

Abstract

Education policy depends on demographic disaggregation to identify inequities, allocate resources, and evaluate programs, from accountability reporting and Title I funding to targeted interventions for underserved students. Yet the demographic questions underlying these analyses are typically borrowed from instruments and administrative systems intended for adults, with limited evidence about how well they capture adolescents' identities or experiences. If these measures misclassify youth, miss key subgroups, or are perceived as unclear or exclusionary by respondents, the analyses built on them may be failing to capture systemic disparities.

Existing research on demographic questions with youth has largely focused on reliability and accuracy of self-reporting, e.g., whether adolescents can correctly report household income, or whether their race responses match administrative records. Less is known about how youth themselves evaluate these questions: whether they find them clear, inclusive, and representative of their identities, or what they would advise survey designers to do differently. The Youth Demographic Measurement Study addresses this gap by centering adolescents' own perceptions as evidence for questionnaire design. The study is a national online survey of 4,000 adolescents ages 13–18, fielded in spring 2026, covering ten demographic constructs commonly used in equity analyses: Race/ethnicity, Sexual orientation and gender identity, English learner status, Immigrant background, Disability, Economic well-being, Parental education, School type, Geographic locale, and Academic fit/performance.

Within each construct, respondents answer alternative versions of questions measuring different aspects of the same construct, some common in youth surveys and some not, and evaluate each on clarity, inclusiveness, discomfort, and sensitivity. They also share their thoughts on being asked about the specific construct and on demographic questions more generally. All respondents complete a common set of opportunity and experience measures related to perceived discrimination, difficulty navigating school structures, relationships with adults, mental well-being, and material obstacles, allowing us to examine which demographic measures are most indicative of systemic differences.

This presentation will report early findings. Analyses will describe how adolescents perceive demographic questions overall and by subgroup, quantify the overlap and divergence among alternative measures within each construct, and examine how different measures relate to experiences and sense of opportunity. For example, we will compare whether disability identity, functional difficulty, and program-based measures identify the same or distinct groups of youth, and which are most associated with experienced barriers. By treating demographic questions as objects of study and linking adolescents' own assessments to experienced inequities, this work aims to identify demographic measures that are both more informative for equity-focused disaggregation and vetted by youth themselves.

Author

• George Reuben Garcia, University of California - Los Angeles
  Presenting Author