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Evaluating the Effects of a Multilingual Brochure in the American Community Survey

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Executive Summary The American Community Survey (ACS) questionnaire currently includes a message on the cover that informs respondents how they can obtain assistance in English or Spanish. However, no messages currently exist on the ACS questionnaire or any other ACS mailing piece that explain how households who speak other languages can receive assistance. Therefore, the ACS telephone and personal visit follow-up operations are primarily responsible for data collection from these populations. We would like to use the mail mode to reach out to non-English-speaking households, and let them know that they can receive assistance in their languages. Secondly, we also would like to increase the number of interviews completed for non-English-speaking households prior to telephone and personal visit follow-up activities, thus providing a less expensive mode for collecting data from these households. Shifting respondents into the mail or telephone mode of data collection may also improve the reliability of ACS estimates for speakers of these languages since cases eligible for personal visit follow-up are subsampled. In 2009, we conducted the Multilingual Brochure Test. We developed and cognitively tested multilingual brochures to be included and tested in various ACS mail packages. The brochures contain instructions on how households can obtain telephone assistance in the language they speak, and provide some additional ACS information to give context. The brochures include Spanish, Chinese, Korean, and Russian translations, with English provided as a reference. This experiment took place in ACS production during the months of April, May, June, and July of 2009. The ACS sample during these four months was evenly split into three groups: one group received a version of the brochure in their pre-notice mailing, one group received a version during the initial mailing, and the third group acted as a control and did not receive the brochure. This evaluation examines the effects of the multilingual brochure on the ACS response. A key finding of this evaluation is that adding a brochure resulted in a statistically significant increase in the percent of Chinese/Korean/Russian-speaking households, Chinese/Korean/Russian-speaking linguistically isolated households, Spanish-speaking linguistically isolated households, and combined test-language-speaking linguistically isolated households responding by mail. We also found that there were no differences in any evaluation measures between the pre-notice and initial mailing brochure placements.

Page Last Revised - October 8, 2021
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