This is a Shannon award providing partial support for the research projects that fall short of the assigned Institute's funding range but are in the margin of excellence. The Shannon award is intended to provide support to test the feasibility of the approach; develop further tests and refine research techniques; perform secondary analysis of available data sets; or conduct discrete projects that can demonstrate the PI's research capabilities or lend additional weight to an already meritorious application. The abstract below is taken from the original document submitted by the principal investigator. DESCRIPTION: The investigators will use the 5 percent public use microdata sample (PUMS) from the censuses of 1980 and 1990, and the May 1995 Current Population Survey (CPS) to examine four major areas: 1) the patterns and extent of intermarriage across race and Hispanic origin categories, 2) the heritability of the identities of parents onto the children in mixed marriage households, 3) the changes in these patterns over time and among cohorts; and 4) the implications of the interactions of intermarriage and identity choices for the measurement of race and ethnicity now and in the future. This research will contribute in three ways: Substantively, by combining the race and Spanish origin questions to create fine grained categories, descriptive and analytic accounts of intermarriage and heritability will be provided at a far finer level of categorization and detail than has been available in previous studies. The research will also produce new data on an area that has been little addresses with large scale empirical data up to now: the identities of children in intermarried households. Methodologically, they will extend the method of population simulation (or projection) they have developed, which permits taking a more realistic account of the patterns, extent and effects of intermarriage and heritability. Finally, this work is policy relevant. Because a growing proportion of the population has mixed heritages, government record keeping such as those of the census, of vital statistics, and of most affirmative action programs have developed administrative procedures which uses algorithms (which differ by agency) to assign identities in ambiguous cases. This research will provide information on the actual social choices made by parents of multiracial individuals and by interracial individuals themselves. This information can be used to improve vital and other statistics which are now subject to inconsistencies of numerators and denominators arising from ambiguities in assigning racial and ethnic identities.
