{"id":42177,"date":"2010-02-05T13:17:19","date_gmt":"2010-02-05T18:17:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/2010\/02\/05\/covering-census-2010-a-workshop-for-journalists\/"},"modified":"2024-04-14T04:10:02","modified_gmt":"2024-04-14T09:10:02","slug":"covering-census-2010-a-workshop-for-journalists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/social-trends\/2010\/02\/05\/covering-census-2010-a-workshop-for-journalists\/","title":{"rendered":"Covering Census 2010: A Workshop for Journalists"},"content":{"rendered":"

Journalists Ron Nixon of the <\/em>New York Times and Paul Overberg of <\/em>USA Today presented a workshop for journalists on how to cover the 2010 Census at the Pew Research Center Jan. 21. The session was moderated by D\u2019Vera Cohn, a senior writer at the center and the former demographics reporter for <\/em>The Washington Post. The workshop\u00a0 was co-sponsored by Investigative Reporters and Editors. <\/em><\/p>\n\n

In the following edited excerpts, ellipses have been omitted to facilitate reading.<\/em><\/p>\n\n

D\u2019VERA COHN:\u00a0 I\u2019d like to welcome you to the second part of our Census 2010 event, a workshop for journalists.\u00a0 First I want to thank our cosponsor, IRE<\/a>, and especially its director Mark Horvit for agreeing to put this on with us.\u00a0 IRE, as many of you know, offers training, data and expertise. I know they\u2019re planning to ramp up their ability to reach out and help journalists with the 2010 Census.<\/p>\n\n

We at the Pew Research Center also have plans and some things that have already been implemented to report on the findings and methods of the census itself.\u00a0 We launched an \u201c<\/strong>All Things Census<\/a>\u201d page yesterday with postings about census findings and methods, which will include some of our work as well as links to work from around the country, including some news stories.\u00a0 So please send us links to your stories if you think we should comment on them.<\/p>\n\n

We released a poll<\/a> yesterday that was mentioned in the first session about census attitudes and awareness.\u00a0 We\u2019re doing our own line of research on this, I might add, independent of the Census Bureau.\u00a0 They didn\u2019t have a voice in designing the questionnaire, which is about what people know of the census and what their plans are to answer forms or not answer their forms.<\/p>\n\n

In keeping with our informal spirit, I won\u2019t give you a long introduction for our speakers except to say our first speaker, Ron Nixon, has had years of experience with data, working for IRE, working in Minneapolis and now as a projects journalist for the New York Times<\/em> in Washington.\u00a0 Paul Overberg has been the database guru at USA Today<\/em> for many years.\u00a0 I think he may know more about the census than some people at the bureau itself.\u00a0 I think between the two of them we\u2019ve got it covered.<\/p>\n\n

RON NIXON:\u00a0 I\u2019m going to go over some background, some of the things that the census is doing right now to streamline their process to make the gathering easier than in the 2000 Census.\u00a0 But also, I will be looking at what their plans are and what they\u2019re doing now in communities along with some of their vendors. I have some documents including their communications plan<\/a>,<\/strong> contacts with their vendors and things like that.<\/p>\n\n

In ramping up for the census, one of the first things that I did was grab the Census budget justifications and start going through those to see what they\u2019re doing.\u00a0 You can get a copy of their budget justification at OMB, Office of Management and Budget, or you can get it from the Census themselves.\u00a0 What it does basically is go through their request for money.\u00a0 They have to justify why they\u2019re asking for all this money.<\/p>\n\n

So in 2009, they asked for about $2.1 billion for ramping up, which included about 16,739 FTEs (Full-Time Equivalent), not including all those numerous people that are going to be out there knocking on doors and giving out the forms.\u00a0 In the 2010 budget cycle, they asked for $6.9 billion.\u00a0 As you can see, the FTEs went up to 105,391.\u00a0\u00a0 And in their budget projections, they were saying that for the life cycle of this thing, it\u2019s going to cost about $14.7 billion for them to do a complete and accurate count of every man, woman and child.\u00a0 And, of course, we know it\u2019s the largest peacetime mobilization.<\/p>\n\n

They sort of reengineered the census this time around.\u00a0 Some of this stuff was talked about earlier today.\u00a0 The ACS, the American Community Survey, is one of the big changes that impacts the 2010 Census because they don\u2019t have to do the long form any more.\u00a0 So with the ACS, there\u2019s a cost savings.<\/p>\n\n

They\u2019re going to change some of the maps and the boundaries that we saw the last time in the 2000 Census to make political, legal and statistical boundaries more accurate.\u00a0 And proper allocation of more than $200 billion is based on these.\u00a0 It\u2019s going to improve the accuracy of redistricting.\u00a0 Of course, a lot of that\u2019s going to hit the states\u2013and improve the accuracy of reapportionment.<\/p>\n\n

They\u2019re going to mail this second questionnaire to nonresponsive households.\u00a0 They\u2019ve tested that in 2003 and 2005.<\/p>\n\n

Census Outreach Campaign<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

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

Minority media. I know I was talking to the National Newspaper Publishers Association, which is a group of about 200 different black newspapers throughout the country.\u00a0 And they haven\u2019t heard much from the census or their vendors about outreach on this. And so that\u2019s a line of reporting that I actually hope to get into myself.<\/p>\n\n

Religious organizations are, of course, playing a big role–churches, mosques, synagogues–and that\u2019s part of their communications and outreach plans.\u00a0 State and local governments have their own Web sites.\u00a0 And I know that Mount Pleasant in New York actually put out a request for proposal for vendors to do their community outreach.\u00a0 So you have different layers of this, both from the federal, state and local level where everybody is trying, because again there is a lot at stake, both in terms of funding, political representation.<\/p>\n\n

There\u2019s these multi-language instructions and forms that are going out now.\u00a0 So you\u2019ll have in some communities English, Spanish, I think it\u2019s like eight different languages.<\/p>\n\n

D\u2019VERA COHN:\u00a0 Let me read some numbers that Census Director Groves presented during his talk<\/a> before this workshop began.\u00a0 He was talking about how 13 million households will get a bilingual English standard form offering the option to reply in either language.\u00a0 Forms will go out in six languages as Ron mentioned.\u00a0 But there will be 59 language assistance guides, which will essentially show how a question translates from English into another language.\u00a0 And those guides will enable the census, the bureau believes, to reach more than 99% of the population.<\/p>\n\n

They\u2019ll also have promotional materials, ads in 28 languages.\u00a0 They\u2019ll have capabilities with their non-census partners for reaching out to people in 101 languages.<\/p>\n\n

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

The communications vendor is Draftfcb<\/a>.\u00a0 It\u2019s based out of Chicago.\u00a0 The contract is a $250 million to $300 million contract to do this outreach and they subcontracted it out to these various firms to deal with the various ethnic groups.<\/p>\n\n

For African-Americans, Black Africans, Caribbean folks and Haitians, GlobalHue<\/a> is this firm that they\u2019re using.\u00a0 For Hispanics, there\u2019s two–GlobalHue Latino and D’Exposito & Partners.\u00a0 For the Asian groups, there\u2019s IW Group.\u00a0 Native Americans, there\u2019s a G&G Advertising.<\/p>\n\n

[are going to be more prevalent]<\/p>\n\n\n

There is a rollout plan that\u2019s about this thick for the entire thing, including measures of success:\u00a0 How will we know that we\u2019ve been successful in getting the information out to people?\u00a0 And then following through on that, the kinds of response rates they want, making sure that they got the proper media.\u00a0 You know, the Super Bowl is going to be a big one.\u00a0 They\u2019re supposed to have a big blowout there.\u00a0 Various ethnic events, they are having huge advertising there.<\/p>\n\n

There was a little blowup<\/a> with Draftfcb about a year ago where people with the Census advisory committees<\/a> said that the company was not doing an adequate job in providing outreach to the various communities.\u00a0 And there was some concern about it.\u00a0 I\u2019ve asked the Census if they would give me the updates\u2013when you\u2019re a contractor you have to give these updates, progress reports.<\/p>\n\n

I\u2019ve asked for all the contracts and the subcontracts for each one of these particular vendors to see how they\u2019re actually going to go about getting this information.\u00a0 And if I do get it, I\u2019ll be more than happy to share it rather than having people file additional FOIAs for it.\u00a0 So just shoot me an e-mail at nixon@nytimes.com.<\/p>\n\n

Problems for the Census<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

One of the things that\u2019s really impacting this census is foreclosures.\u00a0 As you know, because of the global recession and the national recession a lot of people have been forced to move, so that the mailing list that they have generated over time may no longer be accurate.<\/p>\n\n

Fear over immigration status<\/em>\u2013particularly for Hispanics.\u00a0 That\u2019s something that they\u2019ve tried to deal with for years, telling people that this is not looking at your immigration status, but there\u2019s still fear of that.\u00a0 It keeps people from filling out these forms and keeps the response rates in that particular community low.<\/p>\n\n

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

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

Scams<\/em>\u2013of course, any time the government collects information on something, someone is involved in it.\u00a0 I saw a couple of things online where people were offering to fill out your census form for you for a fee.\u00a0 It\u2019s kind of the H&R Block of census.\u00a0 Come in, we\u2019ll fill it out for you.\u00a0 Those kinds of things are going to be going on in the communities as well.\u00a0 And this is a line of reporting that I certainly hope to do.<\/p>\n\n

The ACORN effect<\/a><\/em>—<\/strong>everybody is familiar with ACORN by now, right?\u00a0 But it\u2019s having an effect\u2013and someone told me this on background\u2013 in that people feel like they\u2019re being vetted by the Census because of what happened with ACORN.\u00a0 The partner organizations that would do what ACORN and other groups have done for the longest time–that is help with outreach to communities, help people understand what the census is about, why it\u2019s important–feel like there\u2019s more pressure.\u00a0 And so some groups have chosen not to partner with the Census this time around because of this ACORN effect.<\/p>\n\n

And just from talking to people in some of the groups here in D.C., that\u2019s been the case.\u00a0 In Minnesota, my home state, I talked to a few people.\u00a0 But a lot of the community groups that sort of take positions that are deemed to be somewhat more radical that would have partnered with the Census previously are not doing so this time around.\u00a0 And I don\u2019t know what effect that will have on the collection of this information.<\/p>\n\n

[A good question for journalists to pursue is]<\/p>\n\n\n

I want to see what communities are doing, what state and local governments are doing, what the Census itself is doing.\u00a0 And then how effective their vendors have been and seeing their advertising plan.\u00a0 The other thing is to do a sample of the advertising in the various communities by going to the TV station and just looking at the paid ads to see how much they\u2019ve actually paid on this and when those ads are. You can do that; it\u2019s public information. See when they\u2019re targeting the ads, how they\u2019re targeting, times, events, and that kind of thing.\u00a0 So you\u2019ll get a sense of how effective this will be.<\/p>\n\n

PAUL OVERBERG:\u00a0 This is Christmas Eve for me.\u00a0 You know, this is the last day of school and summer vacation is stretching out in front of me.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t get any better than this.<\/p>\n\n

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

Last time there was a huge issue which made Congress\u2019 role in the 2000 Census much more meddlesome and troublesome in some ways in terms of getting the census done on the schedule that it has to get done on.<\/p>\n\n

In the 1990s, the Census Bureau said we can actually take the census and where the places are that we don\u2019t get good response we can adjust for that with a statistical sample.\u00a0 And then we\u2019ll take a big post-census survey and, in the places where we know we didn\u2019t get good response, we\u2019ll adjust the totals up and down based on the survey.\u00a0 This is sort of pretty standard stuff in statistical science.<\/p>\n\n

And as this plan went forward in the \u201990s, it got to a Supreme Court case in 1999.\u00a0 The Supreme Court looked at the law that governs how the Census Bureau is supposed to do the census. The Supreme Court said, well, you can\u2019t use statistical adjustments for reapportionment, which is just which state gets how many seats in Congress.\u00a0 But for everything else the census law seems to permit that.<\/p>\n\n

So the Census Bureau said, well, okay, that scraps half of our plan.\u00a0\u00a0 They scrapped part of the plan and they changed things around and they retained a way to go ahead and still do a post-census adjustment for things like redistricting data and all of the other uses that the Census Bureau data get released for.<\/p>\n\n

The unadjusted data came out.\u00a0 The decision had to be made by March of 2001 whether or not the adjusted data was going to be released.\u00a0 Was it better?\u00a0 They found huge problems with it.\u00a0 And they had to bite the bullet and say, no, sorry, we\u2019re going to go with the unadjusted data.<\/p>\n\n

They had to make another decision in October of 2001, not for redistricting stuff, but for everything else for the rest of the decade:\u00a0 Should we use this adjusted data?\u00a0 At that point they had done more feverish research and found some of the big problems that they had seen in the 2000 Census that this post-census survey had not been able to catch.\u00a0 And they said, no, we can\u2019t adjust.\u00a0 We cannot adjust and still be confident that, at the levels at which people are going to use the data, down at the tract level, it\u2019s going to be more accurate than the unadjusted data.<\/p>\n\n

Operational Improvements<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

So that\u2019s off the table completely this time.\u00a0 The salutary effect of that may be that a lot of the effort all through the planning for the 2010 Census was to get it better by operations improvements, not statistical adjustment and things like that.<\/p>\n\n

So there has been a lot of focus on things like fixing the address list and cleaning it up, and there has been a lot of improvements in terms of things like, let\u2019s go ahead and innovate, and let\u2019s send a replacement questionnaire out, if people don\u2019t send back a questionnaire.\u00a0 Survey people have been doing this for 30, 40 years, and they know that it boosts your response rate.<\/p>\n\n

The Census Bureau was way behind, very conservative on this sort of thing.\u00a0 That\u2019s one of the big innovations, this time.\u00a0 There will be a replacement questionnaire\u2013not everywhere, but in the places that they know are hard to count.\u00a0 One of the things that they\u2019ve done, that they spent a lot of time and effort on last year:\u00a0 They literally had somebody walk every street in the country, to make sure that where they had an address, the building was still there.<\/p>\n\n

In the previous session, Joe Salvo<\/a> from New York City\u2019s Department of Planning put up a picture of a typical house you might see in Queens, where there are five mailboxes at the door.<\/p>\n\n

So last summer they had 140,000 people walk every street in the country, and map every address, and find new ones, and take out old ones, and check things like subdivided ones.\u00a0 This is the only thing that they did with these handheld computers that they spent a fortune on and ended up getting not much out of. They were able to stand there, they literally put a person on each doorstep, and they stood there, and they grabbed a GPS latitude-longitude off the global positioning system satellite.<\/p>\n\n

So now they not only have a clean address list, they can send somebody back there when they are building all of the follow-up lists for the census this time, for the people who don\u2019t send back the forms. That can not only speed up the follow-up, but it can make it more accurate, because they\u2019re not rushing, and they\u2019re sending the right people to the right places.<\/p>\n\n

Hard-to-Count Database<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

One of the things that they focused on is this hard-to-count database.\u00a0 They built a tremendous amount into the planning of the census this time–how do we target better? Not just in the advertising, but in the planning of the advertising.\u00a0 So they took the response rates from 2000\u2013 at the census tract and census block level\u2013and they matched that and did a lot of analysis against demographic data.<\/p>\n\n

They found a good way to predict–by basic demographics, things like language spoken, and income, and is it a rental unit\u2013how likely people are to respond to the census.\u00a0 There\u2019s a hard-to-count score for every census tract in the country, of which they are about 65,000.<\/p>\n\n

It\u2019s on their Web site. You can download it \u2013 it\u2019s a spreadsheet, and you can put it into software and you can analyze it yourself.\u00a0 We did a story<\/a>\u2013USA Today<\/em> offered it a couple of months ago\u2013 and we put a map on our Web site and in the paper.\u00a0 So every census tract in the country has a score, and then, obviously, they have looked at things like, okay, why is it hard in this census tract?<\/p>\n\n

This summer, what they did with the stimulus money\u2013the extra billion dollars they got from the stimulus\u2013was that they hired a lot more people to staff.\u00a0 There\u2019s a staff person responsible for each of those census tracts, and the volunteers who are there.<\/p>\n\n

This summer they did a walk-around in every tract.\u00a0 Where are the churches?\u00a0 What are the important employers?\u00a0 Where do people hang out? How are we going to target the people here?<\/p>\n\n

So there\u2019s been a tremendous amount of that, that didn\u2019t happen last time.\u00a0 The same thing happened in the buying of the media\u2013the paid media–that you\u2019re going to see in the next two months.\u00a0 Where do we need to put ads out, and in what language, and in what medium?\u00a0 Should we be buying billboards?\u00a0 Should we be buying ads in the local black newspaper?\u00a0 Is it fliers that we hand out at bus stops? How do people move around?\u00a0 What are the trust points and institutions in each neighborhood?<\/p>\n\n

That is all built into their communications plan.<\/p>\n\n

One of their big slogans for the ad campaign is \u201c10 questions, 10 minutes.\u201d\u00a0 If you take out the screening questions, you know, can you please put down your phone number in case we have to follow up–six questions about each person in the household get answered.\u00a0 That\u2019s all.\u00a0 Just six.\u00a0 It\u2019s the name, the birth date and age \u2013 they want the birth date, because people tend to round, if they just ask for the year.\u00a0 It\u2019s the birth date and age; it\u2019s the gender; it\u2019s Hispanic or not, and then it\u2019s race.\u00a0 And then the final question is, what is your relationship to the house-holder or the person who is filling out the form?<\/p>\n\n

Shorter Short Form<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

This is the shortest mail census ever.\u00a0 There is no long form, which used to go, as Ron said, to one household in seven, the thing that would ask all about commuting and income and education and occupation and industry and that sort of thing.\u00a0 That\u2019s not there.\u00a0 That\u2019s all in the ACS; that\u2019s a whole separate thing now.\u00a0 So the whole thing fits on one page per person.\u00a0 And you literally can do it in two minutes if you move along.\u00a0 You can do it in one standard commercial break, I think.<\/p>\n\n

This has all sorts of beneficial effects.\u00a0 They found last time a tremendously lower response rate for the long-form households than short-form households since the thing went on for pages and pages and pages.\u00a0 They think that will help improve response this time.<\/p>\n\n

Precision<\/em>. Ron talked about improving the mapping stuff.\u00a0 And I told you about the GPS coordinates they now have for every address in the country.\u00a0 So they have a clean address list, which is good if you\u2019re mailing stuff.<\/p>\n\n

[non-responding]<\/p>\n\n\n

QUESTION about whether the address locations are public information.<\/p>\n\n

[National States Geographic Information Council<\/a>]<\/p>\n\n\n

You can imagine about how important that data could be, and helpful for local government operations, especially ones that don\u2019t have sophisticated planning and GIS systems. At some point, I think, they\u2019re going to come up with some compromise, and the state geographical officers are even willing to lobby Congress now to get the law changed\u2013Title 13\u2013 which spells out the parameters of how the Census Bureau does its stuff, and what\u2019s confidential.<\/p>\n\n

Foreclosure Crisis Impacts<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

Recession.<\/em> Obviously the recession is going to have a big effect on the Census Bureau.\u00a0 One of the things that they\u2019ve built into their hard-to-count database now, in addition to all the scores,\u00a0 is a tract-level foreclosure database and a tract-level vacancy database.\u00a0 They are going to watch, as the forms start coming back, at the tract level, how much that sort of things affects it.\u00a0 They\u2019ve got unemployment rates at the county level, or as local as they can get them, and they\u2019re going to be watching that sort of thing.<\/p>\n\n

The biggest worry they have is that foreclosures have doubled up households.\u00a0 It\u2019s epidemic in some parts of the country.\u00a0 The problem is that they go and they mail the form\u2013the postal carrier takes it and says, well, okay, this house has been boarded up for two months, it\u2019s foreclosed.\u00a0 They return it as undeliverable. That\u2019s not the problem.<\/p>\n\n

The problem is where did those people go?\u00a0 Where are they now?\u00a0 And I know that if I have to move out of my house\u2013it gets foreclosed\u2013and I have to live in my brother\u2019s basement for the next six months, I\u2019m going to feel a little ashamed.\u00a0 I\u2019m not going to be bragging about that with my friends.\u00a0 And when the census form comes to my brother, is he going to make sure that he counts me and my wife and my two kids living in the basement?<\/p>\n\n

Not only is there a stigma issue, there\u2019s a logistical issue:\u00a0 Oh, he\u2019s only here for a couple months, so it doesn\u2019t really matter\u2013we don\u2019t count him here.\u00a0 Well, they\u2019re supposed to be counted, wherever they\u2019re living on April 1.\u00a0 It\u2019s a huge issue that\u2019s now been moved into the communications plan–making sure, especially in those places where they know foreclosures are rampant, to make sure everybody knows, even though he\u2019s only here for a couple months, you count this family, or this guy, or whoever it is.<\/p>\n\n

The targeting system.<\/em> In addition to producing this hard-to-count score for every census tract, the Census Bureau had their contractor do a huge, long survey about a year-and-a-half ago \u2013 4,000 people. In addition to basic demographics of these people, they asked dozens and dozens of questions about their attitudes toward the government and their attitudes toward the census and their knowledge about the census.<\/p>\n\n

They produced their own segmentation system.\u00a0 Claritas and a couple other businesses do a job of categorizing Zip codes and even smaller areas with cute names like \u201cstation wagons and furs,\u201d or \u201cupscale starters,\u201d and things like that.<\/p>\n\n

The Census Bureau has done that as well with the results of this survey.\u00a0 So they have about eight groups on which they have done a cluster analysis and found how people categorize in terms of their attitudes towards the census, and the kinds of media they consume.\u00a0 That\u2019s also a piece of this communications plan.<\/p>\n\n

Census 2000 was the first paid advertising campaign for the census.\u00a0 It was pretty much, sort of a mass-market, plain-vanilla campaign.\u00a0 There was a lot of volunteer effort as well.\u00a0 This one is leagues beyond that in its sophistication and in its depth and in its diversity.<\/p>\n\n

They literally can target people\u2013even, say, middle-aged, white, middle-income householders, who may be at various stages of their life and have very different political opinions. They know where those people are on the ground, and they can target them in terms of the media that they get and the message they get and why they would want to fill out the census.<\/p>\n\n

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

So you can see that places with a lot of poverty are hard to count.\u00a0 But look at how close they are to places that are relatively easy to count \u2013 right in the middle of, you know, certain wards in Washington, D.C.\u00a0 You can see all kinds of variety just in Southeast D.C.\u00a0 You can see the same sort of thing in Arlington County, all over southern Montgomery County \u2013 a lot of variation.\u00a0 Some of this is based not just on poverty but on stuff, obviously, like language and the percentage of rental units versus owned units, and things like that.<\/p>\n\n

QUESTION about where people should be counted if they live part of the year in one place and part of the year in another, such as college students and snowbirds.<\/p>\n\n

PAUL OVERBERG:\u00a0 There\u2019s a whole set of rules basically, a primer that they give the telephone operators who are going to be at their call centers, detailed sets of rules about what they should say when they get a call like:<\/p>\n\n

Well, should I fill it out?\u00a0 My husband\u2019s a consultant and he\u2019s away on a two-month assignment.\u00a0 Should I count him here?\u00a0 Or, my son\u2019s at college.\u00a0 Or, I live exactly six months a year in Michigan and six months a year in Fort Lauderdale; where should I fill out the census form?\u00a0 Or, we have an au pair here for five months; should we count her or not?<\/p>\n\n

You can download the basic script that the phone operators<\/a> are going to use and the rules; it\u2019s on the 2010 Census Web site.<\/p>\n\n

QUESTION about counting college students living in dormitories.<\/p>\n\n

D\u2019VERA COHN:\u00a0 The question was, who\u2019s in charge of counting kids in dorms, and Paul can go into that.\u00a0 A dorm is a group quarter just as is a nursing home or a prison or a military barracks.\u00a0 Generally, they work with the Bureau to count folks there.\u00a0 There were some big problems with group quarters counts from 2000, which, by the way, keep in mind when you\u2019re using that data currently, and they\u2019re hoping to make it better this time.<\/p>\n\n

PAUL OVERBERG:\u00a0 Group quarters is any time there are more than 10 people living together who aren\u2019t related.\u00a0 About 3% of the people in this country are living in group quarters.\u00a0 The biggest ones obviously are prisons, dorms and barracks.\u00a0 But it\u2019s the hard-to-define, more blend-in kind that create problems in places like college towns, but also, urban areas \u2013 halfway houses, shelters for battered women, and group homes for the mentally retarded, and all these sorts of places.<\/p>\n\n

The Census Bureau has a list just like their master address list.\u00a0 And actually, this is the first census where they\u2019ve actually merged the two.\u00a0 They don\u2019t have separate divisions trying to track this stuff.\u00a0 They think this will make it a lot easier to process.\u00a0 And they went to all the local governments and said, give us your list.\u00a0 And they\u2019ve added a bunch of them.<\/p>\n\n

It\u2019s easy with a dorm at Georgetown.\u00a0 It\u2019s been there every census for the last 50 years.\u00a0 It\u2019s harder with the crisis pregnancy home that comes and goes, those sorts of places the city knows about but the Census Bureau doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n

So they\u2019ve compiled a list and they visited each of those \u2013 is this still there? who\u2019s in charge of this place? who can we come to when we get back to the site and hand out the census forms there? et cetera, et cetera.<\/p>\n\n

It\u2019s easy when you\u2019ve got a prison.\u00a0 Pretty much everybody is under control there.\u00a0 Not so easy with a dorm.\u00a0 It\u2019s really hard with places where the people come and go; even the coordinator may come and go with a shelter or something like that.<\/p>\n\n

But they\u2019ve got a much better list of those now this time, they think, and they will go and hand out the forms and they will get them back.\u00a0 And then depending on the degree of, as the Census Bureau calls it, \u201cinstitutionalization\u201d\u2013 prisons being one extreme and shelters being quite the other extreme \u2013 they\u2019ll have more or less ability to make sure that they get all the forms back.<\/p>\n\n

You\u2019ve got 100 dorm rooms; we need 100 forms back.\u00a0 We don\u2019t get all the forms back, we need to go and find the persons who live in room 58 of that dorm and we at least need to know that they\u2019re there, and two or three basic things about them.<\/p>\n\n

If we know their gender, we know their age and we know their race, we can do a lot of fleshing out of the details with statistics.<\/p>\n\n

They almost didn\u2019t release the 2000 group quarters data it was so bad.\u00a0 It had so many problems, partly because of duplication issues \u2013 college kids counted in the dorm and back home.\u00a0 Their de-duping process didn\u2019t work well at all in 2000.<\/p>\n\n

QUESTION about whether Americans overseas are included in the census count.<\/p>\n\n

PAUL OVERBERG:\u00a0 Yes, but only for the purposes of apportionment. This is the census of the people who live in the United States, except starting in 1990, federal employees who are overseas on Census Day get counted through their agency and assigned back to a state\u2013not to a locality or any address.\u00a0 They get assigned to a state.<\/p>\n\n

So the Pentagon has a list of the hometown of record of every serviceman.\u00a0 And everybody who is deployed, National Guard or regular, on Census Day, the Pentagon will give the Census Bureau a list that basically says, North Carolina, 12,408 people; Ohio, 6,107 people.\u00a0 Those will only get added to the totals for the formula that cranks out the House apportionment\u2013nothing else.\u00a0 No funding, no redistricting inside the state counts, anything else.<\/p>\n\n

Let\u2019s say they live in North Carolina just off the base, say, just off Camp Lejeune, whoever is in that household would get the form and they should count that person if that\u2019s where they normally live do.<\/p>\n\n

QUESTION about counting troops deployed overseas.<\/p>\n\n

PAUL OVERBERG:\u00a0 If your husband\u2019s overseas, don\u2019t count him.\u00a0 If he\u2019s just, say, over at Fort Hood for training for a month, you can go ahead and count him, but if he\u2019s deployed in Afghanistan, don\u2019t count him; we\u2019ll catch him on that count.<\/p>\n\n

RON NIXON: Just to add, I was in the military in 1990 for the Census and I was not counted because I was off in the first Gulf War. So my wife counted people in the household then but not me, so I was absent.<\/p>\n\n

[after the 2000 Census]<\/p>\n\n\n

PAUL OVERBERG:\u00a0 The Census Bureau actually, after the 2000 Census, did a test and included overseas, trying to count Americans.\u00a0 And as they predicted, it was horribly expensive and just horribly incomplete.\u00a0 They did a couple cities; I think Paris was one.<\/p>\n\n

Nobody is counted overseas except federal employees because obviously, there, you\u2019ve got the administrative records to know exactly how many there are, and you\u2019ve got to assign them back to some place.<\/p>\n\n

This reminds me, if you do nothing else in covering the taking of the census, and also then, reporting out on the results, remember the three rules of taking a census:\u00a0 You have to count everybody, count them once and count them in the right place. That\u2019s a really hard job, as we found out in 2000; is a really hard job.<\/p>\n\n

The duplication is tremendous and you have to be able to catch them.\u00a0 And they didn\u2019t do a good job of de-duping in 2000.<\/p>\n\n

And, in the right place. Now that we\u2019ve got the precision of GIS systems drawing the district lines and satellites placing each address, it matters down to within 100 yards or so.<\/p>\n\n

QUESTION about whether prisoners are included in the census count in their home state or in the state in which they are incarcerated.<\/p>\n\n

PAUL OVERBERG:\u00a0 The prisoners are counted where they\u2019re incarcerated as opposed to where they lived, wherever that was, before they were incarcerated.<\/p>\n\n

The Prison Policy Initiative<\/a> has done a lot of the work.\u00a0 But a lot of the cities that have a substantial portion of convicts who are somewhere else in the state at a prison in some remote rural area say, this is just depriving us of their presence, their representation in terms of funding, but also it de-citizenizes us of them.\u00a0 It\u2019s not fair to count them when they\u2019re in rural Upstate New York when they really live in New York City.<\/p>\n\n

There was some back-and-forth study that got done on this, this decade.\u00a0 The counting procedure this time is the same as last time.\u00a0 They get counted where they live, which is in the prison.<\/p>\n\n

There are a raft of difficulties in trying to figure out where somebody who\u2019s been living in a prison for six months or a year or five or 10 years\u2013where you would assign them to back in whatever place, and who would you believe, where they actually lived?<\/p>\n\n

And it\u2019s just not practical, just like trying to track down anybody who\u2019s not a federal employee overseas to actually get them in and get them assigned to some place because it\u2019s got to be precise.\u00a0 You can\u2019t just assign them to the borough of Brooklyn or to the city of Yonkers.\u00a0 You\u2019ve got to assign them to an address or you\u2019re basically creating a secondary system that different from everybody else in terms of the precision of where they get counted.\u00a0 So it isn\u2019t going to change any time soon, I don\u2019t think.<\/p>\n\n

Let me just keep moving along with some of the differences.\u00a0 This census is much more polyglot than last time.\u00a0 Last time, the form came in one language\u2013English.\u00a0 This time, the form will come in six languages. Spanish is the most common one.\u00a0 They\u2019re going to send 13 bilingual forms.\u00a0 The other languages include Chinese and Russian and, I think, Vietnamese and Arabic and Korean.<\/p>\n\n

If you go to the Census web site<\/a>, you\u2019ll see that there is a scrolling set of other-language prompts that may prompt you to grab a dropdown, which are in 59 different languages and more alphabets than I\u2019ve ever seen.\u00a0 And what that pulls up is what\u2019s called \u201cthe assistance guide.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s an actual replica of the census form, and all the wording is exactly the same as the census form but it\u2019s done in that language and that alphabet.<\/p>\n\n

It basically is designed so if you put it side-by-side with the English form, even though all you speak is Bengali, you can actually fill out the English census form because you\u2019ve got the replica in Bengali right next to it, and Dari and Dinka and Navajo, and all kinds of languages, Native American languages, and languages I didn\u2019t know existed.<\/p>\n\n

QUESTION about how the Census Bureau chose the languages in which translated forms would appear.<\/p>\n\n

PAUL OVERBERG:\u00a0 One of the things that they did\u2013and this is one of the benefits of the American Community Survey\u2013is they ask you every year on the ACS, what language is spoken in this household?\u00a0 And they tabulate more than a hundred of them \u00a0nationwide.<\/p>\n\n

So they look at the list and they start down from the most common and they go down as far as they can.\u00a0 The media campaign is in 28 different languages, if you look at the bus shelter ads and the handbills and the newspaper ads and the TV ads and all that stuff.<\/p>\n\n

So it\u2019s 28 languages for the media, 59 for the assistance guides, and they have partner organizations that speak something like 101 languages.\u00a0 That count includes eight forms of Chinese, various dialects and writing systems.\u00a0 So maybe it\u2019s only 90 instead of 100, depending on how you count.\u00a0 But it\u2019s much more polyglot than it used to be because the country is.<\/p>\n\n

And in some ways, the Census Bureau was behind the times in 2000.\u00a0 They\u2019re doing a lot of catch-up now, but this country is obviously getting more diverse, and I think you\u2019ll see even more of that in the years to come.\u00a0 This means, obviously, that they have a better chance at getting better response rates, especially from these hard-to-count people.<\/p>\n\n

There are some things that are the same this census as the last census.\u00a0 We hand out something like $400 billion a year that\u2019s tied to census counts, and the political power in the House of Representatives, state by state, is apportioned by the counts, but also the lines of state assembly districts and city wards are drawn based on them.<\/p>\n\n

Power shifts are a constant and there are \u00a0going to be more power shifts in this census, just like there were last time.\u00a0 And so much of what we do in 2011 will be chronicling that.\u00a0 Right now, it\u2019s a lot more fun to focus on this massive civic exercise and the operational details of it, because, if you think about it, there\u2019s nothing else in this country that we all do, or have to do.<\/p>\n\n

We don\u2019t all pay taxes; we don\u2019t all watch the Super Bowl; we don\u2019t all vote; we don\u2019t all go to public schools.\u00a0 You know, think of something else that\u2019s pretty embracing in American life.\u00a0 We all don\u2019t watch \u201cAmerican Idol,\u201d that\u2019s for sure.\u00a0 The census, though, is everybody, by design and by dint of $14 billion this time.\u00a0 You can still get a lot for $14 billion in terms of covering a country that\u2019s this big and this diverse and this stubborn about not wanting to be counted, sometimes.<\/p>\n\n

But the power shifts are going to be there.\u00a0 We can pretty well tell how Congress is going to line up after the data come out.\u00a0 You can see pretty much which states are going to lose a seat\u2013Iowa, Pennsylvania, New York are pretty guaranteed.\u00a0 Texas will gain three or maybe four.\u00a0 California will not gain one for the first time ever.\u00a0 Arizona and Florida will gain a seat, probably.<\/p>\n\n

There are a few states that are on the bubble.\u00a0 And actually, that\u2019s where the precision of the count matters.<\/p>\n\n

QUESTION about a recently defeated congressional proposal to ask citizenship status in the 2010 Census, and about the role that members of Congress play in the design and operations of the census.<\/p>\n\n

PAUL OVERBERG:\u00a0 One of the successes of the Census Bureau over the last half-century has been creating this culture and this mystique that it\u2019s a sort of an apolitical priesthood of data.\u00a0 And if you\u2019re trying to design a massive organization and keep them all focused, in a variety of complicated missions, that\u2019s not a bad way to go if that is the primary purpose.<\/p>\n\n

Inevitably, there is some of that.\u00a0 There was much less of that this time, in terms of Congress.\u00a0 This Congress didn\u2019t have to worry about sampling and the whole method of how that might affect apportionment, compared to 2000.\u00a0 Last time when the 2000 Census numbers were released it was a Republican administration, but most of the census was built from 1995 to \u201999 under a Democratic administration.\u00a0 And actually, that\u2019s one of the reasons why sampling went forward as far as it did.<\/p>\n\n

President Clinton believed the people at the Census Bureau who said we can do this, we can make this work.\u00a0 And he trusted them.\u00a0 As it turned out, they were the ones who ended up calling themselves off and saying no, we couldn\u2019t pull it off; we can\u2019t do it.\u00a0 Then, I\u2019m sure, President Bush and the Republicans had some private thoughts about that.\u00a0 But as it turned out, it was the priests of the data who said no, we can\u2019t do this.<\/p>\n\n

[about citizenship status]<\/p>\n\n\n

But there are political influences.\u00a0 They\u2019re very subtle and they tend to play out in the middle years of the decade.\u00a0 But, you know, the census, because it\u2019s so expensive and it\u2019s so complicated, is an intensely empirical exercise.\u00a0 That means it has to work and you have to be able to prove that it\u2019s going to work.\u00a0 There\u2019s no do-overs; there\u2019s no mulligans; there\u2019s no \u201cwe\u2019ll push it down the road a year and then we\u2019ll get to it,\u201d or \u201cwe\u2019ll fix it in version 1.5.\u201d\u00a0 It has to happen right and those 50 state numbers that go to the president on December 31st<\/sup> this year have to be right.<\/p>\n\n

And all the detailed data that comes flooding out a year from March has to be right.\u00a0 It has to be so right that everybody buys it and commits billions of dollars of commerce to it, and all the politicians have to buy into it because it determines who gets what district and where.\u00a0 So even if you\u2019re trying to influence the process, it has to be able to work.\u00a0 And that was one of the laughable things about that citizenship status question.\u00a0 Even if it had come up five years earlier, the first thing they would have said was, all right, let\u2019s see, should we add a question to the census form that says, \u201cAre you here legally or not?\u201d\u00a0 Do you know what that would do to response rates?<\/p>\n\n

Even if it got to the point where the Census Bureau was thinking about putting that question on the form somebody would have gently told those folks, even before they got to the point of having to test it, that this is not going to be a good idea because you won\u2019t catch the people you want to catch \u2013 you won\u2019t find them.\u00a0 You\u2019ll get bad data and you\u2019ll pollute the good data that you\u2019ve got because it\u2019s more incomplete and more sketchy.<\/p>\n\n

The Census Bureau made a good point when that came up this year, dusting off the history files.\u00a0 There was not, even in 1790, but certainly in every census since then\u2013there\u2019s never been an idea that you wouldn\u2019t count everybody.\u00a0 When it got down to it, you would count everybody.\u00a0 The big debate in the Constitution was: How do you count slaves?\u00a0 We\u2019re not going to not count them; it\u2019s just a question of, how do you count them.\u00a0 And ever since the 14th<\/sup> Amendment, if you read the language, everybody gets counted.<\/p>\n\n

Sources for Census Reporters<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

D\u2019VERA COHN:\u00a0 I wanted to cover one thing that we didn\u2019t address explicitly, which is, what are good sources to know about as you try to address how well the census is being conducted.<\/p>\n\n

One is the GAO\u2013the Government Accountability Office<\/a>, the investigative arm of Congress.\u00a0 It does regular work on the census\u2013has done for decades\u2013looking at the operations in place.\u00a0 At one point, they deemed the census an at-risk operation. It\u2019s inherently a high-risk operation.\u00a0 But they went into some detail about what concerns they have.\u00a0 So if you familiarize yourself with the GAO\u2019s work, you can get an idea of what problems they think might happen and track whether those problems actually do happen.\u00a0 There\u2019s also an inspector general in the Census Bureau who issues reports, and there may be some meat for you in that. The census, as Ron mentioned, has a series of advisory committees<\/a> <\/strong>that are supposed to give the census advice on what to do.<\/p>\n\n

And many of them have opinions of when the census is being done right or wrong.\u00a0 There are, for example, advisory groups for professional associations, for people from different racial groups, for local government officials.\u00a0 So that will give you some sense \u2013 give you some people to talk to who can help truth-check whether the census is being conducted well.<\/p>\n\n

The names of those advisory committee members are on the census Web site, yes.\u00a0 Their minutes also are up there, although sometimes it takes a while to get there.\u00a0 There also are the partner organizations, which can be a source for you, locally especially, of whether they feel the census is reaching out as broadly and appropriately, and what kinds of things is the census doing in those hard-to-count tracts.\u00a0 And you know, politicians are always happy to talk.<\/p>\n\n

RON NIXON:\u00a0 Two others\u2013the Congressional Research Service<\/a> has done and will do, I\u2019m sure, more reports on that.\u00a0 The problem with the Congressional Research Service is that not all of their reports are public, but sometimes, the congressional offices can get the ones that aren\u2019t public.<\/p>\n\n

The other thing is the Office of Management and Budget.\u00a0 Of course, they deal with the budget and spending, but they also have this program that\u2019s \u00a0evaluating the performance of the various agencies in carrying out their missions.\u00a0 And they rate them based on a score.\u00a0 Like the list that the GAO had, they also have this list of problematic programs and agencies.<\/p>\n\n

PAUL OVERBERG:\u00a0 I would add a couple others.\u00a0 There\u2019s a group of stakeholder organizations \u00a0\u2013 groups that, you know, count a lot on census data, and good census data.\u00a0 And they\u2019re sponsoring a Web site, which has a blog, called thecensusproject.org<\/a>.\u00a0 Terri-Ann Lowenthal, who spearheads that is a former Hill staffer and very knowledgeable about all the ins and outs of the appropriations process, the operations of the census, etc.\u00a0 And she does a good job of turning a lot of this arcane stuff into English.<\/p>\n\n

[Census Director]<\/p>\n\n\n

D\u2019VERA COHN:\u00a0 And the other thing, actually, is that every community and state is supposed to have a locally based complete count committee to help promote the census.\u00a0 Now, our parent organization\u2013Pew Charitable Trusts\u2013did a report<\/a> about how there have been a lot of budget cutbacks at the state and local level that have hurt the ability of state and local governments to do this kind of work.<\/p>\n\n

Some of that\u2019s being made up in the nonprofit sector, but that could become an issue.\u00a0 But meanwhile, there should be folks in state and local governments whose job is to promote a good count, and they may also be good sources about\u00a0 what\u2019s going on.<\/p>\n\n

RON NIXON:\u00a0 The stimulus has been used to deal with some of those shortfalls in funding.<\/p>\n\n

QUESTION about whether the availability of regularly updated American Community Survey data availability has made up for the loss in dropping the census long form.<\/p>\n\n

PAUL OVERBERG:\u00a0 We could do a whole \u2019nother panel on that.\u00a0 I think that ACS gives us a lot that we never even had with the long form.\u00a0 It\u2019s not as good as the long form on some of the things that the long form gave us.\u00a0 The sample\u2019s not as rich and, certainly for smaller places, whether it\u2019s neighborhoods of a city or smaller towns, you don\u2019t get the data in as timely a fashion.<\/p>\n\n

However, there\u2019s a lot more to the ACS that we never used to have.\u00a0 And the ACS is actually, now, improving the census and the annual estimates programs, because with a national sample, every year, of 3 million people, it\u2019s giving us a timely source of lots of detail, like what languages are we speaking and how many people in this country are foreign-born, never mind their legal status.\u00a0 Just that alone helps improve the estimation process \u2013 the annual population estimates, for instance \u2013 in terms of immigration rates and things like that.<\/p>\n\n

So there are some tradeoffs.\u00a0 There\u2019s no going back, obviously.\u00a0 And one of the big challenges the Census Bureau has for 2010 is, among other things, to make sure everybody knows that there are two separate things.\u00a0 There\u2019s the 2010 Census \u2013 and when that data comes out in 2011, it will be coming out at the same time as the 2010 ACS data.<\/p>\n\n

They want to make sure everybody \u2013 especially those who are helping people disseminate data, like us — makes it clear that there\u2019s two different programs, two very different kinds of data for very different kinds of uses.\u00a0 So I think that the ACS will get better as it goes on, but we tend to think in, sort of, mayfly kind of timescales compared to the Census Bureau.\u00a0 They tend to think in geological timescales.<\/p>\n\n

Data-Release Schedule<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

QUESTION about the data-release schedule.<\/p>\n\n

PAUL OVERBERG:\u00a0 Some day right around Christmas this year, President Obama will get a list of 50 numbers\u2013one for each state.\u00a0 That\u2019s the apportionment count.\u00a0 That will tell us how many seats in the House each state gets.\u00a0 And that does not include D.C., by the way, because, guess what?\u00a0 D.C. isn\u2019t in the House, yet, as a voting member.<\/p>\n\n

By law, that has to get out by New Year\u2019s Day or New Year\u2019s Eve.\u00a0 So typically, they take as much time as they can and they zip it out right at the end of December, right around Christmas\u2013maybe the week before.<\/p>\n\n

[New Jersey and Virginia]<\/p>\n\n\n

D\u2019VERA COHN:\u00a0 The race categories are necessary, in part, because the Voting Rights Act still is in effect in some states and requires that changes cannot be made to voting districts if they would violate equal representation.<\/p>\n\n

PAUL OVERBERG:\u00a0 So those districts have to be fine tuned to within\u2013I think case law, now, pretty much says zero discrepancy unless you would have to split key entities to do it.\u00a0 And with powerful GIS software, you can do that.<\/p>\n\n

So every state, even if the Voting Rights Act doesn\u2019t require them to sort of pre-clear their districts, they have to get their districts down and they have to be precise, to within, like, a few people each.\u00a0 So that data is geographically very rich.\u00a0 All there is, though, is the race totals for each of the 64 race combinations, and Hispanic and not.\u00a0 So you get 120 columns of data times every single row of geographical possibilities.<\/p>\n\n

That all has to come out \u2013 it flows out state by state.\u00a0 So they\u2019ll start sometime around March 1st<\/sup> next year and launch a state or two, or three, every day through March.\u00a0 That way, they take all the time that they can get \u2013 and it\u2019s a rush to get it done that fast \u2013 and still get it out by the statutory deadline of April 1st<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n

[except 18 and over]<\/p>\n\n\n

D\u2019VERA COHN:\u00a0 There\u2019s also an own\/rent question on the short form, which can give you a pretty detailed homeownership rate.<\/p>\n\n

PAUL OVERBERG:\u00a0 Right, there\u2019s that one question on that. \u00a0And once you cross-tabulate everything by that, you get a lot of insight into the community, as well.\u00a0 So that\u2019s the rough schedule.\u00a0 But right now, I\u2019m just hoping to survive the next few months.<\/p>\n\n

D\u2019VERA COHN:\u00a0 Let me offer you one more story idea that many of you, if you don\u2019t know about it already, will get thrown at you.\u00a0 The Census Bureau is promising that by sometime in March \u2013 by the end of March, in fact \u2013 they will be giving you data that will allow you to evaluate real-time participation rates in the census down to the Zip Code or census tract level, and to compare those participation rates with the national participation rate or with any other geographic entity.<\/p>\n\n

So if you\u2019re living in Chicago, you can compare Chicago with Los Angeles or you can compare one Zip Code in Chicago with another Zip Code in Chicago.\u00a0 And they\u2019re promising to update those frequently.<\/p>\n\n

PAUL OVERBERG:\u00a0 I think on the response rate tool that they\u2019re building, it\u2019s only going to run for a month.\u00a0 So I\u2019m not sure how much they\u2019re going to program out beyond what they\u2019re trying to put on their Web site.\u00a0 But they are going to make that data available.\u00a0 So if you build something, you can update it if you bring the data into whatever you\u2019ve built, for whatever works for you.<\/p>\n\n

One of the things that they\u2019re doing, as well, with these partner organizations is, they\u2019re using those daily response rate things to say, all right, here we are in Yonkers and we have 12 census tracts and clearly, we need to send the people out into the streets in these two census tracts and not over here, because they\u2019ll have frequent updates during that crucial late March-to-end-of-April kind of period when people haven\u2019t thrown the forms out, they can still get them a replacement form and they can actually have an effect on the ground.<\/p>\n\n

D\u2019VERA COHN:\u00a0 I want to thank everyone for coming to today\u2019s journalism workshop.\u00a0 We\u2019ll be putting up some of the material from the workshop on our Web site, and I\u2019m sure IRE will, as well.\u00a0 And you know, keep watching.\u00a0 Read our \u201cAll Things Census\u201d page, on which we\u2019ll be posting some commentary and descriptions of what\u2019s going on with Census methods and findings and some resources that might be helpful in your coverage.\u00a0 And good luck with your stories.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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