Asking Questions - The Definitive Guide To Questionnaire Design ...

266 ASKING QUESTIONS
use five- or ten-year age categories in the question, but it is more
accurate and just as easy to code age into single-year intervals initially
and to combine later if necessary. If only a single question is
asked, year of birth is superior to asking age because respondents
concerned about their ages find year of birth less threatening.
In what year were you/was (NAME) born?
Asking About Race and Origin
1. Are you/is (NAME) Spanish/Hispanic or Latino?
No Yes
2. What is your race? (Multiple answers possible)
White
Black, African American, or Negro
American Indian or Alaska Native
Asian
Other (Specify) _____________________
These two U.S. Census questions about Hispanic origin and
race reflect the current ruling by the U.S. Office of Management
and Budget that these questions should be asked separately. To
reduce confusion about the racial question, it is important to ask
the Hispanic (or more general ethnicity) question first. Yet many
Hispanics consider the race question confusing and answer “Other”
after they have already checked Hispanic in the first question.
Many nongovernment researchers simply combine these two
questions into a single question with Spanish-Hispanic-Latino as
one of the racial categories. It has long been recognized that there
is no scientific basis for this classification and that it should be based
on what the person considers himself or herself to be. A corollary
to this is that interviewers should always ask the question; interviewers’
observations are not reliable. In recent years, an increasing