ACS Phone Interviewer Training Manual - Handling Non-Binary Sex responses

Hello,

We are looking for best practices to train our phone interviewers on how to best handle situations when a respondent does not identify as Male or Female when we ask the sex question.

We have a long terms plan to change the questions to include the full spectrum of sexual orientation / gender identity choices, but at the moment we are in need of improving our phone interviewer training to ensure we properly and sensibly handle these situations.

Since the ACS / Decennial Census only collects the Male / Female also, I was wondering if anyone has come across their interviewer training manual or any guidance on this area

Thanks,

Ana

Parents
  • The city I work for conducts many telephone and web surveys of of our residents for a wide variety of reasons.  We have been working to standardize the phrasing of socioeconomic questions, so we can introduce some level of comparability and compare results to ACS and other benchmarks.  The question of sex and gender is probably the toughest one we have struggled with.  Caleb is correct to separate the questions of sex from gender. I would also note that sexual orientation is a third variable here.  I don't have any solutions to offer at this stage but am curious to hear how other organizations have handled this set of topics.

    Here is the language that has been suggested by our LGBTQ+ Commission for gender:

    • Female/woman 
    • Male/man 
    • Non-binary/gender non-conforming (Gender is not exclusively female or male and/or does not fit into one gender category) 
    • Transgender (Sex assigned at birth is different than gender [Not cisgender]) 
    • Cisgender (Sex assigned at birth is the same as gender [Not transgender]) 
    • Self-describe [please enter] 
    • Choose not to answer 

    Note that this proposed language does conflate sex and gender to some degree and does not address sexual orientation.  Does anyone have access to the language used on the recent Pulse survey that provided results based on sexual orientation?

Reply
  • The city I work for conducts many telephone and web surveys of of our residents for a wide variety of reasons.  We have been working to standardize the phrasing of socioeconomic questions, so we can introduce some level of comparability and compare results to ACS and other benchmarks.  The question of sex and gender is probably the toughest one we have struggled with.  Caleb is correct to separate the questions of sex from gender. I would also note that sexual orientation is a third variable here.  I don't have any solutions to offer at this stage but am curious to hear how other organizations have handled this set of topics.

    Here is the language that has been suggested by our LGBTQ+ Commission for gender:

    • Female/woman 
    • Male/man 
    • Non-binary/gender non-conforming (Gender is not exclusively female or male and/or does not fit into one gender category) 
    • Transgender (Sex assigned at birth is different than gender [Not cisgender]) 
    • Cisgender (Sex assigned at birth is the same as gender [Not transgender]) 
    • Self-describe [please enter] 
    • Choose not to answer 

    Note that this proposed language does conflate sex and gender to some degree and does not address sexual orientation.  Does anyone have access to the language used on the recent Pulse survey that provided results based on sexual orientation?

Children