Census May Change The Way It Asks Hispanics To Identify

Census officials released the results Wednesday of research conducted during the 2010 survey during which they sent almost 500,000 different questionnaires with the ethnic and race categories combined. Currently, respondents are asked in the Census form separate questions on race and origin.

Now, that combined question could end up on future Census surveys. The agency will also consider dropping the use of the word “Negro,” leaving Black or African-American, and may add write-in categories to allow Middle Eastern and Arabs to identify themselves.

“It’s premature to talk about what 2020 will look like, but these strategies for testing a combined question were very successful,” said Nicholas Jones, chief of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Racial Statistics Branch in the Population Division. “Given that people are reporting as Hispanic in a separate question, we’re also finding that with the option of reporting Hispanic origin in a combined question, they do so.”

The government did the research in an effort to address a growing disparity in how a diversifying America is grappling with notions of race.

More than 21.7 million went beyond the standard labels and wrote in such terms as “Arab,” “Hatian,” “Mexican” and “multiracial” when the 2010 census asked people to classify themselves by race, the Associated Press reported in February.

Yet, the Pew Hispanic Center notes that the question used in the 2010 Census shows that separate race categories do not always reflect a person’s idea of who he or she is.  More than 19 million people in the 2010 Census chose “some other race” — and the biggest chunk of them are Hispanic, according to Pew research that shows 37 percent were Latino.

Mark Hugo Lopez, Pew’s associate director, also said that in this new combined question format those numbers for Hispanics identifying as “some other race” showed to be very low in comparison. By having a combined option, Hispanics identified more with Hispanic as an identity than race or Hispanic origin groups than in the 2010 Census, he explained.

“This is just an experiment,” Lopez said, adding that it may not impact the end result.

The level of questioning for Hispanics has become an issue of debate in light of the rising Hispanic population growth rate, which now accounts for 16 percent of the total U.S. population. Hispanics are expected to make up 30 percent — or 132.9 million of the U.S. residents — by 2050.

The study mailed experimental questionnaires to a sample of 488,604 households during the 2010 Census, re-interviewed respondents and conducted 67 focus groups across the United States and in Puerto Rico with nearly 800 people.

“The U.S. Census Bureau is committed to improving the accuracy and the reliability of census results by expanding our understanding of how people identify their race and Hispanic origin,” Census Bureau Director Robert Groves said.

Census questions

Census questions

This article was first published in Voxxi.

Raisa Camargo is a staff writer at Voxxi.

Slide Show, USA / Census Latino, Pew Hispanic Center, Race and ethnicity