Identification Section

The identification section asks the respondent to enter information in response to labels such as ‘name,’ ‘postal code,’ etc. This is the inverse of what people do when they extract information from forms–match the label for a piece of requested information and note the information it ‘marks.’ When the labels are unequivocal and the information requested is readily available, this kind of entry task is at Level 1 or lower on the document scale.

There is a ‘glitch’ in this section, however, and it is related to the physical arrangement of the information labels. While the spaces to enter name, address, employee number, and postal code are evidently meant to be completed by everyone, the labels for social insurance number and date of birth seem to be subsumed under the heading for non-residents only. It may appear to some people that the final three pieces of information, country of permanent residence, social insurance number, and date of birth are required only from ‘non-residents.’

This is a ‘plausible distractor’ and we can safely predict that some small percentage of resident form-fillers will fail to enter information because of it. The introduction of a plausible distractor raises the complexity of the task and lowers the probability that the information in the social insurance number and date of birth boxes will be entered. Nonresidents will not experience the same complexity as residents and are more likely to complete the identification section correctly.

Numeric date formats are far from standard. On a typical day of casual reading, one can encounter any of the following formats for April 3, 2000:

Using the numeric format for dates forces most people into a ‘coding/ decoding’ operation as they convert the numbers to the everyday notation, April 3, 2000. When asked, most people will name the month when they give their birthday. They must convert it to numbers before entering it on this and most other government forms.