“Compared to adults, children and adolescents may be more likely to change their race/Hispanic responses for two reasons: Childhood and adolescence are times of personal identity development and young people’s information was probably reported by their parents in 2000 but may be self-reported in 2010,” researchers said.

The report showed that 1 in 16 people — or approximately 9.8 million of 162 million — who responded to both the 2000 and 2010 censuses gave different answers when it came to race and ethnicity.

If extrapolated across the entire population, that would mean that 8.3 percent of people in the United States would have made a change in their racial or ethnic identity in that decade, according to the paper authored by Sonya Rastogi, Leticia E. Fernandez, James M. Noon and Sharon R. Ennis of the U.S. Census Bureau and Carolyn A. Liebler of the University of Minnesota.