In March 2024, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) approved major changes to the ethnic and racial self-identification questions used by all federal agencies, including the U.S. Census Bureau. These modifications include merging the separate race and Hispanic ethnicity questions into a single combined question and adding a Middle Eastern and North African category. Government officials and researchers have requested evidence on how Americans might react to these changes. We conducted a survey experiment with a nationally representative sample of 7,350 adult Americans. Participants were randomly assigned to answer either the existing separate race and ethnicity questions or a combined question proposed by the OMB. We find that the combined question decreases the percentage of Americans identifying as white and as some other race. We identify the key mechanism driving these effects: Hispanics decrease their identification in other categories when a Hispanic category is available in the combined question format. This results in statistically significant decreases in key minority populations, including Afro-Latinos and indigenous Latinos.

中文翻译：

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新的 OMB 种族和民族标准将影响美国人的自我认同方式


2024 年 3 月，美国管理和预算办公室 （OMB） 批准了对所有联邦机构（包括美国人口普查局）使用的族裔和种族自我认同问题的重大更改。这些修改包括将单独的种族和西班牙裔问题合并为一个组合问题，并添加中东和北非类别。政府官员和研究人员要求提供证据，说明美国人可能会如何应对这些变化。我们对 7,350 名具有全国代表性的美国成年人样本进行了一项调查实验。参与者被随机分配回答现有的单独种族和民族问题或 OMB 提出的组合问题。我们发现，组合问题降低了认为自己是白人和其他种族的美国人的百分比。我们确定了驱动这些影响的关键机制：当西班牙裔类别以组合问题格式提供时，西班牙裔会降低他们对其他类别的识别。这导致关键少数群体人口（包括非裔拉丁裔和土著拉丁裔）在统计学上显着减少。