2020 U.S. Census and American Community Survey
This video is to provide basic information about the 2020 U.S. Census and the American Community Survey.
The filing deadline for the 2020 U.S. Census is September 30, two weeks from now. You have probably received mail or an in-person visit from the U.S. Census. You can complete your census online if you haven’t completed it.
The U.S. Census Bureau created a 10-minute ASL video that explains the purpose of the questionnaire and how you can complete it. The link is above in the transcript.
The census has 9 questions. They will ask who lives in the home, whether they own or rent it, their gender (male or female), age, whether the person is of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin, the person’s race, whether a person usually live or stay somewhere else, and the relationships between persons who live in a home.
There is no citizenship question, and the U.S. Census will not ask about your social security number, your political affiliations, or your bank or credit card numbers.
The U.S. Census is collected every ten years and the information in it guides congressional representation and federal funding.
There is no question about whether a person is disabled — specifically deaf — in the 2020 Census. It also doesn’t ask about which language you use. However, there is another questionnaire called the American Community Survey (ACS) that includes a disability and language question. This survey is conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau and it is randomly sent out to 3.5 million homes every year.
The ACS has many more questions than the U.S. Census. For example, it asks what kind of building you live in, what kind of access to the internet you have, whether you are a U.S. citizen or not, your employment and education, and many other questions.
The ACS asks whether you have a hearing disability. The question is, “Is this person deaf or does he/she have serious difficulty hearing?” You can only put down “Yes” or “No.” It also asks whether the person is blind.
The ACS asks whether the person “speaks a language other than English at home” and allows you to write the language. You can write down ASL, but it is not clear if it will be counted.
On the U.S. Census’s official website, it explains that the ACS survey language question is “not designed to identify ASL users.” The language question is there to ensure there is no discrimination against language minorities when they vote. The U.S. Census said “due to the way data are currently collected, we are not able to provide separate data about ASL use.”
What this means is that ACS data will inform us about how many people are deaf out there, but it wouldn’t be clear whether they use ASL or not. So it can be difficult to really look at how many signing deaf people there are in the U.S.
[Sponsored Video from Convo: https://bit.ly/2RyMogR]
So, if you have not filled out your U.S. Census questionnaire, you have two weeks to complete it. And if you get an ACS survey, you can mark down that you’re deaf. For the language question, I would still put down ASL and hope that there can be changes in the future that will make it possible to count how many ASL users there are in this country.
https://www.census.gov/library/video/2020/asl-2020-census-video-guide.html
https://www.census.gov/topics/population/language-use/about/faqs.html