Race and ethnicity data for first, middle, and surnames

Abstract

AbstractWe provide the largest compiled publicly available dictionaries of first, middle, and surnames for the purpose of imputing race and ethnicity using, for example, Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG). The dictionaries are based on the voter files of six U.S. Southern States that collect self-reported racial data upon voter registration. Our data cover the racial make-up of a larger set of names than any comparable dataset, containing 136 thousand first names, 125 thousand middle names, and 338 thousand surnames. Individuals are categorized into five mutually exclusive racial and ethnic groups — White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Other — and racial/ethnic probabilities by name are provided for every name in each dictionary. We provide both probabilities of the form ℙ(race|name) and ℙ(name|race), and conditions under which they can be assumed to be representative of a given target population. These conditional probabilities can then be deployed for imputation in a data analytic task for which self-reported racial and ethnic data is not available.