Validity of infant race/ethnicity from birth certificates in the context of U.S. demographic change.

Birth certificates provide a valuable sampling frame for infant health and disparity studies, as they include information on almost everyone in the target population and on birth parents (e.g., race, ethnicity, and education), and allow researchers to construct subsamples of underrepresented groups (Schoendorf and Branum 2006). Since 1989, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) has tabulated infant vital statistics primarily by assigning the birth mother’s race/ethnicity to the infant (NCHS 2005). Infant outcomes research often follows this convention, yet the practice is subject to critique (Ma 2008). First, there is growing concern about the validity of birth certificate data on race and ethnicity (i.e., Hispanic origin). Comparisons of data from birth certificates with those from other sources suggest that racial/ethnic identification is often consistent for white, African American, and Hispanic birth mothers (Piper et al. 1993; Reichman and Hade 2001; Vinikoor et al. 2010) but inconsistent for American Indians and rarely studied for Asians (Hahn and Stroup 1994; Baumeister et al. 2000). Second, by using maternal race/ethnicity as the measure of infant race/ethnicity, researchers ignore the potential role of paternal race/ethnicity in infant outcomes. Recent studies find that paternal characteristics, including an indicator for missing racial/ethnic data, can have significant associations with infant outcomes (Getahun, Ananth, and Vintzileos 2006; Ma 2008). Third, the practice of using maternal race/ethnicity for the infant may not reflect U.S. demographics. Studies that use the NCHS convention will categorize non-Hispanic infants as white if the birth certificate reports that they have a white mother and African American father. However, parents can identify the same infant as white, African American, biracial, or some other race/ethnicity in surveys and administrative records. The prevalence of mismatch between conventional measures and parental perception is likely to grow with the increasing percentage of infants born from interracial/interethnic relationships in the United States (Atkinson, MacDorman, and Parker 2001; Johnson and Lichter 2010). Existing studies suggest that the race/ethnicity variable produced by the conventional approach may be inconsistent with parents’ view of their children. Using data from the 1990 Census, Qian (2004) focuses on children (under age 5) born to couples in whom one parent is white and the other is not. Qian finds that African American–white couples are most likely to identify their child with a racial/ethnic minority label; Asian American–white couples are least likely. Similar findings come from studies that focus on Asian–white couples’ reporting of child race/ethnicity (Saenz et al. 1995; Xie and Goyette 1997). Using data from a nationally representative sample of kindergarteners and their parents, Brunsma (2005) finds that 10.4 percent of the children are “multiracial by biological parentage,” but that parents report only 2.6 percent to be “more than one race” (2005, 1137). Both Brunsma (2005) and Qian (2004) find that, among interracial couples, parents may tend to report the same race/ethnicity for children as for fathers. Smith et al. (2010) compare child race/ethnicity based on birth certificates with that in health plan records. Using birth certificates as the gold standard (or criterion source), they report that 23.1–33.6 percent of health plan records misclassify child race/ethnicity, primarily due to missing data. Misclassification is low among Hispanic children but high among children in other racial/ethnic minority groups. Although one of the first validity studies of child race/ethnicity, the work by Smith et al. assumes that birth certificate data are accurate, exclusively uses the mother’s race for the child’s, and does not analyze data for infants. This study contributes to the literature by providing the first comparison of infant race/ethnicity from birth certificates with parent report of infant race/ethnicity in a survey. We examine the NCHS convention to classify infant race/ethnicity based on the maternal race/ethnicity listed in infant birth certificates, and we test whether this practice captures the dynamic racial/ethnic distribution in the United States.