RAND Method to Estimate Race/Ethnicity

A Part of the Q-DART Toolset

When self-reported data about individual race and ethnicity are unavailable or limited, RAND's indirect estimation method can generate useful estimates of the racial/ethnic makeup of a population.

The RAND approach starts by combining two commonly used methods to estimate the racial/ethnic makeup of a population–geocoding and surname analysis. The RAND method then optimizes this combination through additional statistical techniques, and substantially improves the accuracy of the resulting data. This tool can be used, for example, to estimate the racial/ethnic make-up of a health plan's members or of the Medicare population of a particular region. The RAND indirect estimation method was found to be 41 percent more efficient than using surnames only, and 108 percent more efficient than using geocoding only.¹

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Footnotes:
¹ Marc N. Elliott , Peter A. Morrison , Allen Fremont, Daniel F. McCaffrey , Philip Pantoja and Nicole Lurie, Using the Census Bureau's Surname List to Improve Estimates of Race/Ethnicity and Associated Disparities, Journal Health Services and Outcomes Research Methodology. Issue Volume 9, Number 2, 2009. http://www.rand.org/pubs/external_publications/EP20090101.html