Five Ethical Risks to Consider before Filling Missing Race and Ethnicity Data

Copyright

2021

Published By

Urban Institute

This report summarizes workshop findings on the ethics of data imputation and related methods related to disaggregating race and ethnicity data. While disaggregating data by race and ethnicity can shine a light on racialized systems of privilege and oppression, and there is a high demand for disaggregated data to fill data gaps, there are ethical risks with scientific methods to fill missing race and ethnicity data. This brief summarizes five ethical risk areas to consider.