Beginning in 2020, the Census Bureau implemented changes to the Hispanic origin question based on extensive research and outreach over the past decade. For more information please see the 2010 Census Race and Hispanic Origin Alternative Questionnaire Experiment and the 2015 National Content Test.

Building upon our research over the past decade, we improved the Hispanic origin question design and updated our data processing and coding procedures for the 2020 ACS.

Although the 2020 ACS Hispanic origin question included the same three detailed checkboxes (“Mexican, Mexican Am., Chicano,” “Puerto Rican,” “Cuban”), along with a “Yes, another Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin” checkbox that was included in the 2019 ACS, there were two important changes to the 2020 ACS Hispanic origin question:

• The instruction to “Print origin, for example” was revised to “Print, for example.”
  
• The example groups were revised from “Argentinean, Colombian, Dominican, Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, Spaniard, and so on.” to “Salvadoran, Dominican, Colombian, Guatemalan, Spaniard, Ecuadorian, etc.” in order to represent the largest Hispanic population groups and the geographic diversity of the Hispanic or Latino category, as defined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidelines .

Additionally, improvements were made to the way write-in responses to the Hispanic origin question were processed and coded. The number of characters captured in each write-in area was increased from 30 to 200. Instead of prioritizing multiple responses into only two codes, up to six detailed codes for each write-in area were coded.

The improvements made to the 2020 ACS Hispanic origin question design, processing, and coding are similar to changes made in the 2020 Census, which are presented in the blog entitled, ‘Improvements to the 2020 Census Race and Hispanic Origin Question Designs, Data Processing, and Coding Procedures’.