On Monday I received our household’s 2010 Census form to complete. For a researcher, that’s a big deal. After all, the Census is the most comprehensive data collection project to occur on planet earth. The U.S. government will spend more than $15 billion on this census cycle. The information generated is vitally important because the data help federal officials determine where to distribute more than $400 billion to state and local governments each year.
Because I am a professional researcher, I wanted to get everything just right; it’s a matter of professional pride. So I read the cover letter carefully. I read the simple questionnaire form a couple of times to be sure that I understood what they wanted, to see if professionally I could learn anything from their questionnaire construction, and also to address my surprise at just how short the form has become. (The Bureau now supplements the decadal census with massive monthly surveys, allowing them to reduce the census questionnaire to just a handful of questions – much shorter than the versions used in previous cycles.)
I filled in the information about myself and my wife without problems. Smooth sailing. Quick and simple. But then I got to person #3 in our household, our oldest daughter. She is adopted from Guatemala. Under question 4 – a question about origins – marking her down as Hispanic was a no-brainer. But the related query, question 5, stumped me. It’s about racial identity. The options provided were white, black, American Indian, Asian Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Native Hawaiian, Guamanian, Other Pacific Islander, and Other Asian. Nothing that fits anyone from Guatemala. Or Mexico, the nation that has provided the U.S. with the largest number of non-native residents. In fact, there was no category that would describe American citizens of Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origins who came from any country located in Central or South America.
It made no sense that there’d be categories provided for groups that represent less than one-half of one percent of the population, but no category for those who represent 16% of the population. And yes, I understand that the Bureau will combine the two variables of origin and race to create a Hispanic origin category, but without instructions, how will the more than 50 million Hispanic residents of the U.S. complete that second question? Will many of them check one of the boxes provided, assuming they apparently belong to one of those groups since infinitesimally small racial groups had their own category to mark? Surely the uber-funded Census Bureau, with the nation’s professional and scholarly talent pool available to draw upon, and a 10-year window in which to create their six question survey, would not have developed a confusing, incomplete question. Especially with trillions of dollars at risk. Clearly, 30 years of experience and advanced degrees in survey research notwithstanding, I was missing something.
And the problem was compounded by my realization that I’d face the same dilemma for person #4 of our household, our next-oldest daughter, who was also adopted from Guatemala.
Stymied, I called the Census Bureau. First, I got the recorded messages which walked me through the process. However, the pre-recorded explanation did not address my concern, so I indicated a need to speak to a representative. Once a live Bureau staffer came on the line I explained my dilemma. She offered to read me the same statement that I had just heard from the automated voice. After I respectfully declined the offer, she indicated that she was not allowed to tell me how to answer the question. I explained my frustration with that, knowing that real money was on the line here – how my tax dollars (and trillions of others) would be allocated according to the percentages emanating from the Census statistics. She was well-trained, though, and refused to help me beyond telling me she was not allowed to assist me in figuring out how to answer their question.
So I hung up feeling as if my concern had not been heard or cared about – which, of course, is nothing new when dealing with the federal bureaucracy. And for my two daughters from Guatemala, I half-heartedly checked the “Other” box and wrote in “Hispanic/Mayan.”
What a bizarre situation. Robert Groves, who heads the Bureau, is a very competent, experienced, and respected researcher. I doubt that he would let a gaffe of this magnitude go unrepaired, if he had the ability to make revisions. Perhaps the questionnaire contains this unfortunate question because the most dreaded event in the life of a researcher occurred: questionnaire design by committee. Departmental committees. House committees. Senate committees.
In the end, the bad news is that there will inevitably be a lot of inaccurate information collected and reported from our government’s $15 billion tax-funded research project, resulting in inappropriate financial allocations of our other tax dollars. But the good news is that I did not have to wrestle with this issue over person #5 in our household, our youngest daughter, who was adopted from Russia. I’m pretty sure she is “white.” And the best news of all may be that I am not the Director of the Census Bureau, forced to have political committees approve the art of survey research and having to deal with complaints from people like me.
March 29, 2010
I too was confused with the mixing of culture and race. As a school teacher in the early 1970’s, I was confronted with a similar dilemma. We were to fill out a form for the government to indicate the culture backgrounds of our students. Sounds innocent, but we were only to use the last name as our clue. Now, knew that I had American Indians in our classes, as well as hispanic students, but their names did not reflect their ethnic background. What, however has this to do with the classroom, or in the case of the Census, determining the count of our people?
April 4, 2010
I wasn’t “stumped” by the racial and ethnic questions. No-I was annoyed. Article 1, Section 2 (as amended by Section 2 of the 14th Amendment) ” The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.”. Anything in there about keeping racial/ethnic stats? And it never said anything about keeping stats on home ownership. So, I just don’t answer anything in it that doesn’t directly relate to a pure population count. Name, age, sex, and familial relationship-that’s it.
enumerate vb 1 : to determine the number of : count 2 : list
April 5, 2010
Did it bother you that they asked questions about people who lived at your house on April 1st, but wanted you to send in the survey as soon as it arrived–several days before the first? Of course, we could all guess probably pretty accurately, but it seems to me that guessing on a survey is not a wise thing to encourage if accuracy is the goal.
April 5, 2010
That’s a great point, Linda. I remember receiving the questionnaire several days before April 1 and wondering whether I was breaking the law by sending it in prior to April 1! I’d agree, it seems that estimating who would be living in your residence several days from when you are instructed to immediately return the survey probably introduces a bit more error into the process. That, in itself, defeats the purpose of doing a census, rather than a survey – i.e. to eliminate such causes of measurement error.
April 11, 2010
Recently, I found the 2010 Census form hanging on my door. As I began filling it out, I came across a dilemma. The U.S. government wants to know if my children are adopted or not and it wants to know what our races are. Being adopted myself, I had to put “Other” and “Don’t Know Adopted” for my race and “Other” and “Don’t Know” for my kids’ races.
Can you imagine not knowing your ethnicity, your race? Now imagine walking into a vital records office and asking the clerk for your original birth certificate only to be told “No, you can’t have it, it’s sealed.”
How about being presented with a “family history form” to fill out at every single doctor’s office visit and having to put “N/A Adopted” where life saving information should be?
Imagine being asked what your nationality is and having to respond with “I don’t know”.
It is time that the archaic practice of sealing and altering birth certificates of adopted persons stops.
Adoption is a 5 billion dollar, unregulated industry that profits from the sale and redistribution of children. It turns children into chattel who are re-labeled and sold as “blank slates”.
Genealogy, a modern-day fascination, cannot be enjoyed by adopted persons with sealed identities. Family trees are exclusive to the non-adopted persons in our society.
If adoption is truly to return to what is best for a child, then the rights of children to their biological identities should NEVER be violated. Every single judge that finalizes an adoption and orders a child’s birth certificate to be sealed should be ashamed of him/herself.
I challenge all readers: Ask the adopted persons that you know if their original birth certificates are sealed.
April 11, 2010
The Census is Constitutionally only for counting how many people there are in order to determine appropriate Congressional representation, and that’s all. They have no business asking anything else. It is not legal for them to claim they are using the census to determine where tax dollars go, and that is a fraud anyway. ZERO of our tax dollars go for services or infrastructure for taxpayers. It ALL goes to paying foreign bankers on our national debt.
April 15, 2010
I am Latino (Mexican-American) and my wife is Anglo (very mixed). So that makes both of us white, according to the Census Bureau’s q5 instructions. My birth certificate lists my race as white.
But our dilemma was on q4 for our children – there was no option for a 50/50 mix. Q5 allows for more than one option to be checked, but q4 doesn’t.
May 15, 2010
Imagine being a substitute teacher in CA’s heavily hispanic Riverside county. The census and now the AZ law creates fascinating dialog. When I can, I step outside the day’s lesson plans to engage my own life-long learning and world view teasers. With the brow/white conflict always under the surface, I ask, “Hey what three races do we have here today” unless I spot a rare Asian. Inevitably it’s white, American Indian, Black, and, of course “Hispanic” or “Mexican”. When I try to assure that most of us here are officially “White,” the discussion gets loud. I try to bring in the blend and the uniformity that is “American.” I make some progress. Sometimes.