Results. Mixed-race adolescents showed higher risk when compared with single-race adolescents on general health questions, school experience, smoking and drinking, and other risk variables.
Conclusions. Adolescents who self-identify as more than 1 race are at higher health and behavior risks. The findings are compatible with interpreting the elevated risk of mixed race as associated with stress.
The preponderance of our evidence supports the conclusion that adolescents who identify more than 1 race are at higher health and behavior risks when compared with those who identify with 1 race only. This applies in a general way and is not distinctive to any particular race combinations. Further, it is not peculiar to any particular type of risk, but to most risks, both health and behavior.
Because risk among mixed-race adolescents is higher for all race combinations, some across-the-board explanation must be inferred. The most common explanation in the literature is stress associated with identity conflict. We cannot test this hypothesis directly. Many of the school variables tested for mixed-race risk are possible consequences of stress (e.g., most of the general health items, considered suicide, and drinking). Stress, then, is a possible explanation of mixed-race high risk because our risk assessment is based on possible stress symptoms. Whether the stress is associated with identity conflict is beyond our resources to test. Gibbs3 warns against jumping to the conclusion without direct evidence that the stresses of mixed-race adolescents are a consequence of race identity problems