Interviewer instructions
Date of birth (P4)
The information to be asked for all persons in this column is the specific month and year when the person was born.
Ask the respondent for the month and year of birth of each person. Code the month using two-digit numerals, as shown below, and write the codes in the boxes provided for that purpose.
January -- 01 July -- 07
February -- 02 August -- 08
March -- 03 September -- 09
April -- 04 October -- 10
May -- 05 November -- 11
June -- 06 December -- 12
[p. 89 ]
Record the year of birth by using only the last two digits of the year and enter this in the boxes provided for the purpose. For example, 1954 will be encoded as "54".
After exhaustive probing and the respondent still does not know the month and/or year of birth, write DK for Don't Know outside the code boxes. For persons born before 1900, code the year of birth as follows:
1890 and earlier -- X0 1895 -- X5
1891 -- X1 1896-- X6
1892 -- X2 1897-- X7
1893 -- X3 1898-- X8
1894 -- X4 1899-- X9
Example:
A person born on March 7, 1947 will have the following entry in P4.
Ethnicity (P10)
In the POPCEN, ethnicity of an individual is generally synonymous to the mother tongue or the language/dialect spoken at home at earliest childhood. Data on ethnicity will be obtained only for Filipino citizens. Filipinos who have acquired foreign citizenship will be considered foreign nationals and their ethnicity will not be recorded. Ethnicity of Filipinos with dual citizenship will, however, be recorded.
There are 82 possible responses for this item as listed in the Codes Sheet. Usually, all that you may need to know is the predominant language or dialect in the area. However, because of migration there may be individuals whose ethnicity differs from the predominant one and you should be aware of this possibility.
The operational definition of ethnicity, because of the blurring of ethnic identities and ethnic intermixture, is through SELF-ASCRIPTION. Ordinarily, an individual acquires the culture of the community in which he lives, thus, he learns to speak the language of his community (becoming bilingual if the community language is not his mother tongue), but by self-ascription he may claim another ethnicity.
To determine an individual's citizenship, ask the respondent "What is ________'s citizenship?" If the person is not a Filipino citizen, enter code 97 -- Alien. If Filipino, ask: "What was ________'s dialect or language spoken at home at earliest childhood?" Use one of the 82 codes for this item.
For children (of Filipino parents) speaking English at earliest childhood, the child's ethnicity would be that of the parent with whom he/she has more association. However, for children who do not talk yet at the time of the census, their dialect would be that of the mother.
[p. 95]
It is possible for siblings to have different ethnicity. For example, suppose a child who grew up with his grandparents in a province where the predominant language is different from the language in the province where his siblings live with their parents. In this case, the child's ethnicity would be different from his siblings as well as from his parents.