A Case Study of the Relative Differences in the Recording of Ethnicity in Birth Records and in the Census: The Hispanic Population of Los Angeles County, California

• Activity Number: 421
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 3, 2010 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Social Statistics Section
• Author(s): David A. Swanson and Matt Kaneshiro*+ and Amanda Martinez
• Companies: University of California, Riverside and University of California, Riverside
• Keywords: differences ; vital events ; Census ; Hispanic identification ; case study ; Los Angeles County

Abstract

We explore the identification of people by race and ethnicity in the US, an important demographic activity found to be subject to varying levels of error in census and vital statistics records. In a case study that examines the number of births recorded for the Hispanic population of Los Angeles County between 1990 and 1999 relative to the number of children aged 0 to 9 years reported in the 2000 Census for the Hispanic Population of Los Angeles County, we use a standard method of demographic analysis, the forward life table survival method (FLTSM). The results suggest that there is a substantial mismatch. On the one hand, it may be that the Hispanic births were over-recorded; on the other, it may that Hispanic children were under-recorded in the census. We discuss reasons why the mismatch appears to better explained by the latter and suugest areas of future research.