To address recent increases in privacy concerns, the Census Bureau has developed a Respondent Identification Policy (RIP) guideline for household surveys that use dependent interviewing techniques. This policy requires that interviewers can reveal personal information from a previous interview to a different household member only if the original respondent has given permission to do so.

This policy is in the process of being implemented, and requires the development of a question to elicit the required information. To our knowledge, two different versions of the question have been used in the field to date. The first was included in the 1999 Questionnaire Design Experimental Research Survey (QDERS), which was conducted by telephone in April 1999. The second was included in the American Housing Survey (AHS)-National, and was administered for the first time in 1999. In these surveys, refusal to give permission was in the range of 6-12 percent (Loomis, 1999; Bates, 2000) . In the QDERS, a follow-up question, which asked about reasons for respondents’ concerns, was asked whenever they declined to give permission. Written entries suggested that some of the “no” answers did not reflect privacy concerns but rather some misinterpretation of the RIP question (Loomis, 1999).