The Bicentennial Census New Directions for Methodology in 1990: 30th Anniversary Edition (2015) / Chapter Skim
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3 Census Methodology: Prior Practice and Current Test Plans
3 Census Methodology: Prior Practice and Current Test Plans
Pages 77-104
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From page 77... ...
1980 CENSUS METHODOLOGY It is convenient for descriptive purposes to divide the process for the 1980 census into eight components. These are (roughly in chronological order)
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From page 78... ...
a master address list of housing units was constructed from a variety of sources; (2) other kinds of group housing were added in; (3)
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From page 79... ...
. In New York City, Philadelphia, and Chicago, the Census Bureau merged the 1970 census master address list with the commercial mailing lists obtained and in New York City also merged the 1978 census dress rehearsal list into the master TAR list.
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From page 80... ...
The Postal Service carried out the third and fourth checks in the TAR areas just prior to Census Day, April 1. In the casing check, 3 weeks prior to enumeration, mail carriers received addressed census questionnaires with instructions to note any addresses to which they deliver mail for which they did not receive a questionnaire.
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From page 81... ...
As one of several experiments conducted as part of the 1980 census in selected district offices, the Census Bureau tested the use of a somewhat different procedure for delivering the questionnaires, called update list/leave. In this procedure, enumerators instead of mail carriers delivered the questionnaires, and at the same time updated the address list (see Chapter 5 for some results of this experiment)
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From page 82... ...
Coverage Improvement Coverage improvement is a term encompassing several different approaches to the collection of information from households that were missed by the master address list, or from individuals within otherwise-enumerated households who were missed or elected not to respond. The various address checks carried out prior to Census Day were part of the coverage improvement effort for the 1980 census.
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In mailout-mailback areas for which Census B ureau staff developed the address list and only two of the pre- Census Day address checks were performed, the field staff rechecked the list for completeness during the second stage of follow-up.
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Chapter 5 describes the experience with coverage improvement in 1970 and 1980 and provides program-by-program estimates of both cost and yield, or net additions to the count of population and housing units. Data Processing The next step in the decennial census process was to take the raw data collected from the enumeration, follow-up, and coverage improvement stages, create computerized household and person records, and edit these data records prior to producing and distributing the final census counts, cross-tabulations, and sample microdata files.
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From page 85... ...
Without adjusting sample weights, the marginal tabulations of basic characteristics contained in the complete count and sample data products would agree only within bounds of sampling error. The Census Bureau forced these marginals to agree closely through reweighting the sampled cases using a technique called iterative proportional fitting (see Appendix 3.2)
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From page 86... ...
There was no prior compilation of an address list, although the Census Bureau estimated total housing unit counts by block for most cities of 50,000 or more population to use as a check on the completeness of the enumeration. On an experimental basis in 1950, the Census Bureau tested the use of a list/leave self-enumeration procedure whereby enumerators listed addresses and left questionnaires for households to fill in and mail back to census district offices.
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From page 87... ...
The success of this experiment led to the decision to expand the mailout-mailback procedure to over 95 percent of households in 1980. The 1970 census was the first to implement specific programs designed to improve coverage, including both checks of the master address list prior to Census Day and programs, such as a recheck of units classified as vacant, conducted after the first stage of follow-up.
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From page 88... ...
The enumerators for the most recent 1981 census completed field operations within about 2 months of Census Day. The questionnaire in 1981 included relatively few items -- 16 questions for each person and five questions on housing and cars.
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. The Netherlands most recently carried out a census of population in 1971 administered by the municipalities, which generated an initial address list from the local population registers, recruited, trained, and paid the enumerators, and used the census returns to update the registers.
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The government used the following registers to carry out a completely register-based census in 1981: • Central population register; • Central register of buildings and dwellings; • Registers of wages and salaries paid to each employee as reported by employers to the tax office; • Registers of income as returned by individuals to the tax office; • Registers of employment insurance and unemployment benefits; • Central register of enterprises and establishments; • Register of educational achievements; and • Geographic address coding files. Problems posed by this census methodology in Denmark are numerous: (1)
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From page 91... ...
The staff prepared detailed research plans in late 1983 and early 1984 on the following topics, each of which relates to an area of interest to the Panel on Decennial Census Methodology (the most recent version is cited in each case) : • "Uses of Sampling for the Census Count" (Miskura et al., 1984)
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From page 92... ...
reviews the rules of residence that are used in the census to determine who should be counted and to assign persons to geographic areas. The first field activities directed toward the 1990 census involved tests of alternative methods of compiling address lists in urban and rural areas that were conducted in several localities in spring 1984 (Bureau of the C ensus, 1984b)
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From page 93... ...
In all instances, the intent is to develop automated processing systems that provide greater management control of the questionnaires and of the address list and that permit entry of responses into computer-readable form on a flow basis. In contrast, the 1980 census local district offices relied exclusively on clerical staff to manually check-in and review questionnaires, update the address list, and perform other opera tions.
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From page 94... ...
Procedures proposed for testing include refining the various checks that are conducted of the mailing list to identify likely problem addresses (e.g., buildings with a central mail drop) and to use an update list/leave procedure for multiunit structures with delivery problems, for which census enumerators rather than Postal Service staff deliver the questionnaires and update the mail ing list at the same time.
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From page 95... ...
A potentially very significant improvement over 1980 census methodology could result from the effort to develop automated procedures that can expedite data processing and lead to more timely availability of the data. Adjustment of the census counts, if it were to be implemented based on the research and testing of coverage evaluation and adjustment methods currently going forward, would also represent an important change for the 1990 census.
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From page 96... ...
The Census Bureau believed it was important to obtain an early determination of the likely gains in timeliness from a two-stage procedure and, hence, proceeded with the test as planned. The panel did not scrutinize plans for the Tampa pretest of automation procedures because the panel is not specifically addressing operational aspects of the decennial census relating to field control of the address list, data entry, and so on.
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To be useful for making timely decisions on census methodology, test data must be obtained, analyzed, assessed, and discussed and the findings used to design subsequent tests. This process is itself time-consuming and requires ample staff and other resources (such as computer resources)
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From page 98... ...
The 1986 field tests should include tests of questions related to coverage improvement (see the discussion in Chapter 5) but could well omit other question tests in order to simplify the logistical problems and costs of fielding the tests.
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From page 99... ...
hould be omitted entirely from consideration for the 1990 cen S sus, based on previous census experience or other survey research results. In Chapters 5 through 8 we comment on the Census Bureau's proposed research and testing program in specific key areas of census methodology related to the panel's charge, including: coverage improvement methods (Chapter 5)
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From page 100... ...
Both of these complications relate to the difficult problem of using an imputation mechanism that produces a "consistent" data set when the process is finished. These two examples may give some idea of the magnitude of the problems encountered in devising an imputation procedure for the decennial census dataset.
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From page 101... ...
This is especially true of imputation of averages, whose use clearly results in a reduction of the estimate of the variance of any esti mate based on the dataset with imputations. Hot-deck imputation avoids this by imputing typical values from the raw dataset, thereby attempting to mimic the variance of the hypothetical complete dataset.
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From page 102... ...
Therefore iterative proportional fitting has the potential for carrying down information from coverage evaluation programs, which is necessarily collected at an aggregate level, to the individual record level of the decennial census data set. This would ensure that the adjusted dataset would be consistent, in a manner described in Chapter 7.
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From page 103... ...
Iterative proportional fitting will, in many situations, reduce the error of the resulting single-cell estimated totals. In the case of controlling the long form to the short form, because the adjustment factor uses row and column totals from the sample data in the denominator, a zero row or column total will clearly require a modification to allow the resulting estimates to be finite.
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