Association between self-reported and objective racial composition among community health center patients

Introduction: Race and ethnicity are crucial constructs in public health research, and the development of measures with which to assess individuals' perceptions of the racial/ethnic composition of their communities is needed. This study was to examine the correlation between a measure of self-reported racial composition and objective data.

Methods: Data from 1,356 adult community health centers patients in Long Island, NY were analyzed. Cross-sectional questionnaires were used to measure subjective racial composition. Participants were asked to describe the racial composition (e.g., mostly Whites, half Blacks, some Hispanics) of six environments (e.g., high school, current neighborhood) and their town of residence. We examined the correlation between self-reported racial composition of current neighborhood and objective racial composition data from 2000 Census (i.e., percentage of White, Black, and Hispanic residents) using Spearman correlation coefficients.

Results: Self-reported and objective racial composition matched for 51.4% of participants overall (61.4% of Whites, 38.6% of Blacks and 51.2% of Hispanics). Self-reported and objective measures of racial composition of one's current living environment showed statistically significant moderate correlations for reporting mostly White (r_s=0.25, p<.0001) and mostly Black communities (r_s=0.3, p<.0001). There were weak correlations for reporting some Blacks (r_s=0.07, p=0.0137) and half Hispanics (r_s=0.06, p=0.0176).

Conclusions: These findings show that self-reported racial composition of current neighborhood is significantly correlated with objective racial composition data for those reporting certain racial compositions. Future studies are needed to examine factors that affect differences between subjective perceptions and objective data in order to study the effects of racial composition on health.