Quantifying Racial Identity: The Identity Point Allocation Approach

• In Event: Identity and Politics

Abstract

Our proposal centers around a new item to measure respondents’ racial/ethnic self-identification. We assess an Identity Point Allocation (IPA) approach, which gives respondents a stock of ten "identity points" to allocate as they see fit across a defined set of racial/ethnic response categories. We compare our IPA with standard race questions, which present respondents with the traditional and categorical, “What racial or ethnic group best describes you?” format. We find that the race(s) with which people opt to identify differs dramatically by the race question approach. Using the standard question approach, just 3% of Americans identify as multiracial. But under the more flexible IPA approach, 44% of respondents characterize themselves as multiracial--including the majority of Blacks and Latinos. We also find that, for a range of political outcome measures, the IPA item for a given racial category appears to be a significant predictor even when respondents who identify with that category are removed from the analysis. We also find interesting differences between African Americans, Latinos, and whites in the IPA measure.

Authors

• Lauren D. Davenport, Stanford University

• Taeku Lee, University of California, Berkeley