Experimentation and Testing Plans for the 2010 Census Letter Report (2009) / Chapter Skim
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Topic areas for research, evaluation, and testing that would come within the panel's scope include questionnaire design, address updating, nonresponse follow-up, coverage follow-up, unduplication of housing units and residents, editing and imputation procedures, and other census operations. Evaluations of data quality would also be within scope.
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Internet Experimentation The use of the Internet for data collection in the decennial census presents important opportunities for cost reductions and improvements in data quality. These include cost savings through the reduction in the number of forms that have to be scanned or keyed for data entry, reduction in the processing of requests for mailing of foreign language questionnaires, and savings in field work as a result of more prompt receipt of individual data.
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Given that the use of administrative records in such a manner provides one of the few opportunities to substantially reduce census field costs in 2020, it deserves serious attention in the planned 2010 experiments. It is important to note that most of the above possibilities for research on administrative records might be properly considered priorities for "evaluation" rather than "experimentation" since they would not require additional or special field data collection.
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238-240) suggested that the Census Bureau "undertake a continuing research effort to assess the accessibility of facility records at group quarters facilities and to determine whether the existing data systems meet census data collection needs." We endorse this suggestion as it is an essential step to assessing the possibilities for using administrative records to supplement or, as necessary, replace traditional enumeration in group quarters.
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Given the need to redesign the field data collection plan at this late stage, the census dress rehearsal conducted in 2008 was essentially limited to a test of the mailout/mailback portion of the census process, with no testing of the nonresponse follow-up, coverage follow-up operations, or many other component processes. The Census Bureau acknowledges that the dress rehearsal provided an inadequate test of the 2010 census processes.
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Furthermore, given that many fields of the various system files are overwritten continuously during the census, this means that these data archives should retain snapshots of files that will change during the course of census operations, and this should be provided for as frequently as needed. This data archival effort needs to include all parts of the census process, including address list development, nonresponse follow-up, coverage follow-up, group quarters enumeration, data capture and data treatment, and coverage measurement.
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Furthermore, by guaranteeing access to this information, the Census Bureau would ensure that it could carry out evaluations that would guide the Bureau towards a more effective and cost-efficient design for the 2020 census. Therefore, we recommend that -- as systems for the 2010 census are finalized by the Census Bureau and its contractors -- appropriate archival outlets be created for all systems, including components of the field data operational control system, so that the relevant data to construct a master trace database or "audit trail" of census processes are retained.
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The panel countered that estimates based on an analysis of 2000 census data, while somewhat flawed due to such changes, would still provide a sense of whether the potential reductions in field costs would be large enough to justify a separate experiment during the 2010 census. Based on such estimates, if the cost reduction seems likely to be, at best, modest, the experiment should be eliminated or redesigned to include assessment of even fewer enumeration attempts or the use of administrative records in lieu of field data collection.
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That is, while the privacy notification may have the effect of reducing mail response rates, it will at the same time allow for the use of administrative records to reduce costs and improve data quality, for example, by substituting for last-resort and proxy enumeration. Therefore, it seems reasonable to use this opportunity to determine the degree to which administrative records can reduce census costs and improve census data quality and whether such benefits offset the reduction in mail response and the associated increase in the costs of nonresponse follow-up.
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That is, although the addition of any question on the census form has an associated cost of processing and a possible decrease in overall data quality, the inclusion of this question could produce higher quality responses as to census residence and/or it could also affect the frequency of coverage follow-up interviews or their accuracy. Therefore, it is important to include plans in the experimental protocol that would attempt to evaluate this tradeoff, since this should be key to making any decisions about the inclusion of such a question in the 2020 census questionnaire.
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The Census Bureau has proposed four experiments to be conducted during the 2010 census, but the panel believes that they suffer from design flaws and, significantly, lack connection to potential visions for the 2020 census. The panel suggests that three topics that are given little or no weight in the current CPEX plan -- Internet data collection, use of administrative records in various census processes, and elicitation of accurate residence information -- have greater potential to decrease the cost and increase the quality of the 2020 census, and so should be built into the 2010 experimental program.
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