September 2nd
9/2/2010 — Mark Partridge
Census in Detail
Many censuses have 2 different questionnaires (previous censuses, not 2010)
- Short form: goes to majority of households
- sex, age, race, ethnicity, marital status, relationship to “householder” or “person 1,” (not citizenship, voting registration…)
- US 2000 Short Form
- US 2010 Short (and only) Form
- Long form: goes to a sample of households (could be large, several million…)
- short form questions, disabilities, income, veteran status, citizenship status, migration, place of birth, etc…Goes to about 1/6 of households
- US 2000 Long Form
- “100% Data” [in theory] comes from the short form
- “Sample Data” comes from the long form
- “SF1” and “SF2” are 100% data (SF=Summary File)
- “SF3” and “SF4” are sample data
Censuses, in theory, are
- Universal (100% coverage
- Simultaneous (single “snapshot” where no person is counted twice)
- Individual (counting and recording who lives in households, not only their numbers or characteristics)
- Private information for the US census is made publicly available after 70 years. (Names of respondents, respondent characteristics…)
Census residence definition can be:
- de jure (legal place of residence, “usual”) — used by US
- de facto (where are you sleeping on census day?) — used by other countries such as Australia
US Census Geographic Coverage
- 4 census regions: Northeast, South Midwest, and West.
- 9 census divisions: Pacific, Mountain, West North Central, West South Central, East North Central, East South Central, South Atlantic, Middle Atlantic, New England.
- Small Area Geography. Commonly, states are divided into counties, towns, cities, blocks, census tracts.
A Census is a big administrative and logistical undertaking for collecting data:
- setup administrative system: supervisors, statisticians, enumerators, software developers,…
- developing questionnaire
- cartography
- pretest
- design data processing system
- follow up for non-response
- consistency checks
- imputation and “correction”
imputation flag, if flag=1 this variable was synthetically generated, not an item that was completed by respondent or was completed incorrectly by respondent
page revision: 9, last edited: 06 Aug 2013 06:54
