{"id":41990,"date":"2010-01-29T17:54:43","date_gmt":"2010-01-29T22:54:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/2010\/01\/29\/challenges-ahead-for-the-2010-census\/"},"modified":"2024-04-14T03:30:55","modified_gmt":"2024-04-14T08:30:55","slug":"challenges-ahead-for-the-2010-census","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/social-trends\/2010\/01\/29\/challenges-ahead-for-the-2010-census\/","title":{"rendered":"Challenges Ahead for the 2010 Census"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jeffrey S. Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Research Center, spoke at a forum on the 2010 Census on Jan. 21 about challenges the Census Bureau faces in attempting to count everybody. He also talked about the potential problem of differing data from the 2010 Census and American Community Survey. The event was held at the center; it also was sponsored by the American Statistical Association and the DC chapter of the American Association of Public Opinion Research.<\/em><\/p>\n\n

In this edited transcript, ellipses are not used in order to facilitate reading.<\/em><\/p>\n\n

I\u2019m going to talk about the next year to two years.\u00a0 The Census Bureau has in many ways, I think, had an extraordinary decade.\u00a0 Not without issues, but I\u2019m going to focus more on the positive than the negative.<\/p>\n\n

Census 2000 was in many ways extremely successful.\u00a0 The net undercount was very low, notwithstanding some issues of duplicates.\u00a0 The black\/not-black difference in coverage was reduced substantially.\u00a0 They reached a timely decision not to adjust.\u00a0 Be it right or wrong, they did it on time and they got data out in a very usable way very quickly.\u00a0 The challenge in many ways, I think, is to repeat that and do at least as well and hopefully improve.<\/p>\n\n

The second challenge is the American Community Survey.\u00a0 It may not be the war, the army of the census, but it\u2019s close.\u00a0 And it\u2019s been rather remarkable.\u00a0 It has changed the culture of the Census Bureau in many ways, some very apparent and some subtle in the way the analysts at the Census Bureau work.<\/p>\n\n

It became fully operational in 2006 by including group quarters.\u00a0 They released multiyear data for the first time in 2007 and we now have what we and others call a fire hose of data. We\u2019re no longer sipping data; we\u2019re inundated with it and it\u2019s difficult to keep up.<\/p>\n\n

The intersection of these two, I think, is going to be a challenge. I\u2019m going to talk a little bit more about that as a challenge for the Census Bureau but also for you and for us to deal with in the coming couple of years.<\/p>\n\n

[Citro]<\/p>\n\n\n

[used in the census outreach campaign]<\/p>\n\n\n

Duplicating the 2000 Census Success<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

[see slide]<\/p>\n\n\n

But 1990, however, was a bump in the road.\u00a0 Lack of paid advertising, which we heard about, I think, was a big problem.\u00a0 The undercount went up in percentage terms; it went up even more in numeric terms.\u00a0 And it\u2019s the first time, at least in this cycle that we\u2019ve been able to measure, that we saw that.\u00a0 And 2000 represented a major turn-around.\u00a0 The demographic estimate is basically a tenth of a percent of the population net was missed \u2013 a rather remarkable figure that we\u2019ll be hard-pressed to duplicate.<\/p>\n\n

[see slide]<\/p>\n\n\n

[in the black and not-black undercount]<\/p>\n\n\n

This is the challenge going forward\u2013what happens?\u00a0 Where do we go from here?\u00a0 And the scale of this\u2013a 1% undercount is 3 million people, so it\u2019s not a small number of people.\u00a0 So the challenge to get the counts right and to keep the undercount rates low is going to be difficult.\u00a0 The operations and the planning and the advertising, I think, were key in 2000, and it sounds to me like that lesson has been learned and improved upon.<\/p>\n\n

American Community Survey and the 2010 Census<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

The American Community Survey<\/a> is really a rather remarkable operation.\u00a0 I was skeptical in the \u201990s that this would be pulled off, but it seems to be working.\u00a0 We get detailed, census-like data. (And by the way, I say \u201ccensus-like\u201d data:\u00a0 It\u2019s not quite the same, but the majority of data users think it is the same as the census, and for the non-sophisticated users, the distinction is completely missed.)\u00a0 We get annual data; we\u2019re getting data based on averages across 12 months of surveys, 36 months and 60 months.\u00a0 We get annual data for the total population of areas and for the characteristics.<\/p>\n\n

The distinction here is those population totals don\u2019t come from the ACS survey itself. The totals come from the population estimates program of the Census Bureau, and are not census-like.\u00a0 The ACS totals by race come from the population estimates program.<\/p>\n\n

This distinction is an important one and it\u2019s overlooked by most of the people who use it.\u00a0 We\u2019re seeing a broad user community develop:\u00a0 That\u2019s an invaluable tool for census planning. There are a lot of sophisticated users. There are a lot of unsophisticated users. And there are a lot of people who should be using it, who aren\u2019t.\u00a0 But the confusion between \u201ccensus\u201d and \u201csurvey\u201d is ongoing and is difficult.<\/p>\n\n

The challenge and the potential train wreck, I\u2019m afraid, is that the data users have been getting data from the ACS for their areas, for their communities, for several years.\u00a0 There are going to be a series of numbers out there that people will have used.\u00a0 And the census is going to come in and the numbers are going to be different from those in the ACS.\u00a0 It\u2019s going to be a lot different in some places because of coverage error; it\u2019s going to be a lot different in some places because of estimation error.\u00a0 But it\u2019s going to be different.<\/p>\n\n

The problem, I think, is the credibility of both data systems is going to be at issue.\u00a0 There are going to be large differences in places.\u00a0 The political users of this will want whichever is larger, and they\u2019ll challenge whichever one is smaller.\u00a0 We–the data user community and the Census Bureau, as the producer of this–are going to need a strong defense of both data systems. It\u2019s going to require help from key users like us to emphasize that these are both valuable systems.\u00a0 We have to explain why do both.\u00a0 I think we need to preempt that criticism as soon as we can and talk about the value of both of these data systems.<\/p>\n\n

The census, in addition to the political uses for reapportionment and redistricting, offers us an opportunity to re-benchmark the population estimates and the ACS. It\u2019s critical that we are able to do that periodically.\u00a0 But the ACS data provides a broad range of information and it gives us up-to-date annual data that is a tremendous resource, and much better than anything we had.<\/p>\n\n

The feedback of ACS in the census process was alluded to earlier.\u00a0 I think it\u2019s been a major breakthrough in planning for the census, and the value of it I don\u2019t think can be understated.\u00a0 The feedback that we haven\u2019t seen yet, to my satisfaction at least, is the feedback from the ACS into the population estimates program, that can improve and make the ACS more census-like, if you will.<\/p>\n\n

Getting the Message Out<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

[population]<\/p>\n\n\n

[population]<\/p>\n\n\n

[2010 ACS numbers]<\/p>\n\n\n

Finally, I think, as an analyst who tries to look at this data over time, it\u2019s been very difficult to monitor changes from year to year, because the weighting has been adjusted three times in the last three years.\u00a0 I think to make this data most useful for analytic purposes, it would be extremely important to go back, look at the last five years of ACS data and produce a set of consistent numbers that are weighted both to the 2000 Census and 2010 Census so that we have a clean product going forward.<\/p>\n\n

I think there\u2019s a challenge for the Census Bureau, certainly, but I think for us, as sophisticated data users, there\u2019s a challenge that these data will present, to be clear to our consumers and the population at large.<\/p>\n\n

Earlier postings from this event include the transcript<\/a> and audio<\/a><\/em> of a presentation by Census Bureau Director Robert Groves, as well as a transcript<\/a> from speaker Constance Citro and a transcript<\/a> from speaker Joseph Salvo. <\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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