Background
The 2020 Census used the required two separate questions (one for Hispanic or Latino origin and one for race) to collect the races and ethnicities of the U.S. population — following the standards set by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in 1997.
Building upon our research over the past decade, we improved the design of the two separate questions and updated our data processing and coding procedures for the 2020 Census.
This work began in 2015 with our research and testing centered on findings from our 2015 National Content Test and the designs were implemented in the 2018 Census Test.
In this America Counts story on racial and ethnic diversity, we cross-tabulate the race and Hispanic origin statistics, as data users often do, such as with the 2020 Census redistricting tables.
Here, we see results that are not as impacted by the race reporting patterns of Hispanic or Latino respondents. Thus, we are confident that the changes we are seeing from 2010 to 2020 in the diversity measures, which rely on mutually exclusive Hispanic origin by race groups, likely reflect actual demographic changes in the population over the past 10 years as well as improvements to the question designs, data processing and coding.
We are also confident, as shown in our research over the past decade, that using a single combined question for race and ethnicity in the decennial census would ultimately yield an even more accurate portrait of how the U.S. population self-identifies, especially for people who self-identify as multiracial or multiethnic.
Today’s companion America Counts story on the overview of race and ethnicity explains that differences in overall racial distributionsare largely due to design improvements in the two separate questions for race data collection and processing, as well as some demographic changes over the past 10 years.
The improvements and updates enabled a more thorough and accurate depiction of how people self-identify, yielding a more accurate portrait of how people report their Hispanic origin and race within the context of a two-question format. These improvements reveal that the U.S. population is much more multiracial and diverse than what we measured in the past.
