Who Is Multiracial? Depends on How You Ask” A Comparison of Six Survey Methods to Capture Racial Identity [REPORT]

By Eileen Patten

In 2014, as Pew Research Center prepared to conduct the first major study of the views of multiracial Americans—a group that, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, is poised to triple by 2060—we faced a fundamental and unavoidable methodological challenge: how to define and measure the concept “multiracial” in a public opinion survey context.

Racial identity is far from a straightforward concept, and when multiple strands of identity come together this has the potential to increase the complexity. An individual’s racial self-identity may take into account a range of factors beyond genealogy, including family ties, physical appearance, culture and how others perceive them. In other words, being multiracial is more than just a straightforward summation of the races in an individual’s family tree.

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