2019 Census Test Responses Comments

Census Bureau Responses to the 2019 Census Test FRN Comments
#	Comment	Response
1	The Census Bureau should postpone the test until a decision is issued by the Supreme Court and/or be prepared to cancel the test should the Supreme Court issue a decision that results in the removing the citizenship question from the 2020 Census. [Asian Americans Advancing Justice, NALEO]	The Census Bureau will proceed with the 2019 Census Test regardless of how the Supreme Court rules, as the Census Bureau considers the information it will reveal to be valuable.
2	The Census Bureau should analyze response rates for Asian subgroups and, if necessary, should increase the sample size of the test to accommodate this analysis. [Asian Americans Advancing Justice]	The Census Bureau currently plans to examine the impact of the experimental treatment on demographic distributions for relationship, sex, age, Hispanic origin, race, tenure.  The race analysis will be primarily focused on the major race groups as defined by the Office of Management and Budget:  White alone, Black or African American alone, American Indian or Alaska Native alone, Asian alone, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander alone, Some Other Race alone, and two or more races. We have considered the recommendation to conduct further analysis for Asian subgroups and will calculate and compare demographic distributions between treatments for the detailed Asian subgroups. To conclude there is an effect of the experimental treatment, a difference must be statistically significant. Differences between treatments for subgroups will need to be larger than national estimates in order for differences to be statistically significant.
3	The 2019 Census Test should provide more language support for the other non-English languages beyond the telephone questionnaire assistance (TQA). [Asian Americans Advancing Justice]	The detailed support for other languages is still being developed for the 2020 Census. The Census Bureau is unable to develop specialized materials for this test due to the compressed schedule to conduct the test.
4	The Census Bureau should provide language assistance guides in NHPI languages. [Asian Americans Advancing Justice]	The detailed support for other languages is still being developed for the 2020 Census. The Census Bureau is unable to develop specialized materials for this test due to the compressed schedule to conduct the test.
5	The Census Bureau should produce results in as timely a manner as possible, expand the scope of the test to expand sample size in hard-to-count communities, and add non-response follow up to the 2019 Census Test. [NALEO]	The Census Bureau will produce results from this test in a timely manner. The overall, national-level self-response rates will be available in August 2019. Preliminary results to inform the 2020 Census operations will be available in October 2019. The 2019 Census Test is a nationwide self-response test consisting of about 480,000 housing unit addresses that are in mailable areas across the United States. The sample is geographically stratified for the purpose of oversampling hard-to-count areas and areas with high proportions of noncitizens to best capture the effects of the citizenship question on self-response. Nonresponse Followup is not in scope for this test. The purpose of this test is to assess the impact of the citizenship question on self-response to inform planning for Nonresponse Followup and communications efforts.
6	The Census Bureau should use this opportunity to test the Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) category on response rates. [Arab American Institute]	The purpose of the 2019 Census Test is to assess the impact of including a citizenship question on the 2020 Census questionnaire on self-response rates. Testing other modifications and changes are out of scope for this test.
7	The Census Bureau should anticipate confusion and anticipate harmful effects that may arise as a result of this test among those in hard-to-count communities. [AAI]	One of the primary objectives of the 2019 Census Test is to inform the Integrated Partnership and Communications Campaign. Information obtained from this test will support the communications planning and partnership outreach, which are critical activities to engage hard-to-count communities.
8	The Census Bureau should add Arabic resources for this test. [AAI]	Arabic is one of the languages supported for the test. Respondents are informed in the materials mailed to them that the Census Bureau has staff who speak Arabic available to answer their questions and to conduct the interview.

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