A 2025 article published in Demography by DUPRI Scholar Jen'nan Read and DUPRI student Fatima Fairfax has been selected as a a recipient of a 2025 IPUMS Research Award! The IPUMS Research Awards competition honors outstanding research using IPUMS data to advance or deepen our understanding of social and demographic processes. IPUMS looks for papers that use innovative approaches, comparative analyses, and showcase the power of the IPUMS data collections.
The article, "Hidden Heterogeneity: How the White Racial Category Masks Interethnic Health Inequality," was supported by a pilot grant from CPHA. Non-Hispanic whites are commonly used as the reference category in research into U.S. health disparities. Using data on people age 30+ from IPUMS NHIS from 2000-2018, Read and Fairfax document how immigration trends since 1960 have changed the composition and increased the health heterogeneity of this group. White immigrants from the Former Soviet Union fare worse in self-rated health and hypertension, and Middle Eastern immigrants also have worse health than native-born whites. This article builds a strong case against treating non-Hispanic whites as an undifferentiated group when studying racial inequality.