Registrant Demographics

I have a customer needing to collect registrant demographic information in their registration form.    Their Audience Research Team has provided them a list of demographic classifications for self identification.  The customer was going to create a custom field using a validation list to capture this info in their registration form but they are running into a 40 character limit for each answer.   Does anyone have customers collecting this type of information in a Registration form?  If so, how are they capturing it?  It looks like there is a “Nationality” field in the Contact record but that is pulling from the Countries list and isn't helpful in this case.  

 Jeremy Elmore  Mike Schepker 

Katie Solinski  for visibility re: STL Zoo