WVOMH FACT SHEET

This fact sheet provides information about the health of West Virginians by race and ethnicity.  Several challenges occur in preparing any such report.  One of the most basic is deciding which racial and ethnic categories should be used.  The West Virginia Office of Minority Health (WVOMH) recognizes that this is a very sensitive issue and wishes to present information that is detailed, representative and inclusive, but also reliable, useful and respectful of the confidentiality of the individuals whose life experiences are summarized, however crudely, in the statistics that are presented.  As a result, the decision was made to use the categories of race and ethnicity identified by the Federal Office of Management and Budget Directive 15 (as revised October 30, 1997):

Race:

·        American Indian or Alaskan Native:  A person having origins in any of the original peoples of North America, and who maintains cultural identification through tribal affiliation or community recognition.

·        Asian:  A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam

·        Black or African American:  A person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa.

·        Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander:  A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or other Pacific Islands.

·        White: A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East.

Ethnicity

·        Hispanic or Latino:  A person of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race.

It was also decided that the racial categories listed above would generally not be collapsed into an “other race” category, unless available Federal statistics already did so.  While collapsing categories would allow the inclusion of more information, the information would no longer be representative of persons in any of the collapsed racial categories and would not be useful for planning or evaluation.  In order to provide at least some information on persons in all racial and ethnic categories, WVOMH has included both West Virginia and United States data in this report.

DEMOGRAPHICS

West Virginia is less diverse, in terms of both race and ethnicity, than the United States as a whole.  However, as in the US as a whole, Blacks, Asians and Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders tend to be younger than Whites and Hispanics tend to be younger than non-Hispanics; and American Indians/Alaska natives, Blacks and Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders have lower per capita incomes than do Whites and Hispanics have lower per capita incomes than do non-Hispanics.  However, the educational disparity between Hispanics and non-Hispanics is less in West Virginia than in the US as a whole and in West Virginia, Black adults are slightly more likely than White adults to have completed high school or the equivalent, while in the US as a whole, White adults are more likely to have done so than Black adults.  In addition, the per capita income for Asians is greater than that for Whites in West Virginia, while the reverse is true in the US as a whole.