Overview of Hispanic and Race Reporting in Census 2000

• Activity Number: 377
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Thursday, August 15, 2002 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Survey Research Methods*
• Author(s): Jorge del Pinal*+ and Claudette Bennett and Arthur Cresce, Jr. and Elizabeth Martin
• Affiliation(s): U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Census Bureau
• Keywords: Race ; two or more races ; Hispanic origin ; ethnicity ; decennial census

Abstract

In March 2001, the Census Bureau released general demographic characteristics based on Census 2000. Included in this release were detailed tables on race and ethnicity. This paper summarizes key findings from Census 2000 on the racial and Hispanic origin distributions, with a particular emphasis on race reporting by Hispanic ethnicity. Of particular interest was the impact of allowing respondents to report more than one race. Census 2000 results showed that about 2.4 percent of the 281.4 million people in the United States reported two or more races. Nearly 93 percent of all respondents reporting more than one race reported only two races. Approximately six percent of all Hispanics reported two or more races, compared with just under two percent of non-Hispanics. In addition, this paper summarizes detailed data collected from the question on Hispanic origin and the incidence of reporting two or more origins in this question.

In addition, the paper reports some results of an experiment conducted during Census 2000 to evaluate the effects of differences between 1990 and 2000 short-form mail questionnaires upon race and ethnicity data.