Motivating Non-English-Speaking Populations for Census and Survey Participation. Study Series (Survey Methodology No. 2010-08)

摘要

To meet the growing demand of including non-English-speaking populations in its decennial censuses and demographic surveys, the Census Bureau has recently expanded its effort to produce survey materials in multiple languages. However, much of the literature reporting the effectiveness of pre-notification is based on studies of English-speaking populations, except some studies on Spanish language advance letters (e.g., Carley-Baxter, et al. 2007). The Census Bureau has also used a Spanish cover letter as part of its 2007 National Census Test for the Census bilingual form study (see Govern and Reiser, 2007). Still, little is known concerning how speakers of languages other than English react to survey pre-notifications and whether the messages contained in survey materials have the same motivating effect on non-English-speaking populations as they do on English-speaking populations. This study attempts to fill in this knowledge gap by investigating whether non-English-speaking populations differ from English-speaking populations in their perception of and motivation for census and survey participation.