Alisu Schoua-Glusberg

Research Support Services Inc.

Date: Friday, 5/12/2023 08:30 AM

In 2016, the Federal Interagency Working Group on Improving Measurement of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in Federal Surveys issued recommendations for a research agenda to measure sexual orientation and gender identity in federal surveys. These included conducting additional research with Spanish‐speaking populations “to help identify culturally and linguistically competent SOGI terminology and questions.” Although a great deal of research has taken place in the intervening years, the testing in Spanish has been more limited. The 2021 report from the Interagency Technical Group of SOGI Items in the Household Pulse Survey stated that Spanish translation of SOGI items remains a challenge.

Research in Spanish in the past few years has helped make some improvements to the questions or at least shed light on specific ways in which the questions do not perform well for Spanish speakers. For example, in research conducted for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS), Michaels et al. (2017) found that moving “heterosexual” to the end of the response category significantly reduced nonresponse among Spanish-speaking older adult respondents. Otero Class et al. (2022) reviewed open-ended responses to the Spanish sexual orientation question in several Census surveys and found that “something else” responses frequently had write in answers that aligned with the “straight” category and that it is not capturing the intended responses in Spanish.

This presentation will report on research on current Spanish cognitive testing conducted for NCHS on a single gender identity question. Themes and interpretation patterns will be discussed and illustrated with ample respondent quotes. Additionally, ongoing research on a set of improved SOGI questions sponsored by NSF and Census will be discussed.