Measuring Multiple-Race Births in the United States

Jennifer M. Ortman, U.S. Census Bureau
Frederick W. Hollmann, U.S. Census Bureau
Christine E. Guarneri, U.S. Census Bureau

With the advent of multiple-races reporting in Census 2000, Census Bureau demographers were tasked with developing multiple-race estimates of the population and components of population change – births, deaths, and net international migration. Because multiple-race reporting of parents’ race on United States birth certificates is not yet available in all states, national-level data on births are only available by single race categories. In this paper, we present an updated procedure for converting single-race data into the multiple-race categories. We also present an updated method for assigning race to birth records based on the distribution of race reporting for children age 0 in the 2000 and 2010 censuses. These methods are applied to data on births for 2000 through 2009 to illustrate the differences when using a multiple-race allocation as compared to the single-race method.