The U.S. Census Bureau will be testing several updates in their surveys in 2015. They held a public information forum on Monday to outline their research plans addressing changes to things like instruction wording, racial and marital status questions, and the introduction of a web-based collection design.
Nicholas Jones is the chief of the organization’s racial statistics branch. He said the updates are designed to garner more detailed information from participants.
"These web based designed enable us to do much more than paper questionnaires," Jones said. "And we believe these new design approaches will help us collect data not only for the broader race and ethnic categories, but also for detailed race and Hispanic origin groups across the country."
These updates will be tested on a nationally representative sample group. The Census Bureau will also experiment with strategies for non-response follow up. Those operations will take place in Maricopa County next summer.