The following is a press release issued by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine:
The U.S. Census Bureau’s ability to adjust its approaches and innovate enabled it to complete the 2020 census despite the difficulties raised by the COVID pandemic and other challenges, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The report reviews the 2020 census and the quality of data collected and makes recommendations for the 2030 census.
“The 2020 census was completed under exceptionally difficult circumstances, and many of its innovations were successful, including self-response via the internet,” said Teresa Sullivan, chair of the panel that wrote the report, and university professor of sociology and president emerita of the University of Virginia.
Other key innovations included the reengineering of field management and case handling systems, and minor use of administrative records data — such as data collected as part of government tax programs or from the previous census — to enumerate some nonresponding households.
However, the report also identifies several problems, including a widening gap in census coverage and data quality between different racial and ethnic groups compared to the 2010 census. In the 2020 census, net overcounts increased for White and Asian people, while net undercounts increased substantially for Hispanic people, Black people, and American Indians on reservations. These differentials in counting have adverse implications for use of the census data to equitably allocate fixed resources, such as Congressional representation, funding, and services.
The report examines “age heaping” — unusually high levels of reporting of ages ending in 0 or 5, as occurs when roughly estimating a person’s age — as a key indicator of data quality issues. The report concludes that this age heaping was particularly pronounced in 2020 relative to the 2010 census and was largely a function of proxy reporting of census information for nonresponding households, such as from a neighbor or landlord.
The Census Bureau’s decision to use a new and untested approach to protecting the confidentiality of census data heightened concerns regarding data quality. In the very late stages of 2020 census planning, the Census Bureau decided to replace its methods for confidentiality protection with an entirely new approach that had not been tested, prototyped, or deployed in the population census context.
While confidentiality protection is a critically important responsibility of a statistical agency, the report says, this decision was made without appropriate consideration regarding the utility of resulting census data products to fulfill the many important functions of census data. The new methods for confidentiality protection were not ready for use in 2020 census production and substantially degraded the value of the 2020 census data products in terms of timeliness and quality.
Looking Forward to the 2030 Census
The report recommends that as the Census Bureau plans for the 2030 census, it should focus on a small and manageable number of major innovation areas and pursue a rigorous program of testing and systems development. The report suggests the following as priority goals for research and development:
- maximize self-response to the census, including better matching of contact and communication strategies to the desired response mode, with particular attention to hard-to-reach, at-risk populations;
- improve the quality of data in Nonresponse Follow-up, including reduction, if not elimination, of low-confidence proxy reporting when a good alternative is available;
- reduce gaps in coverage and data quality associated with race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status;
- improve the quality of address listings and contact strategies for all living quarters, including group quarters (e.g., nursing homes, college dormitories, prisons); and
- realign the balance between utility, timeliness, and confidentiality protection in 2030 census data products.
Goals and designs for the 2030 census should be developed in true partnership with census data users and the community of myriad stakeholders and state, local, tribal, and federal government partners, the report says.
The study — undertaken by the Panel to Evaluate the Quality of the 2020 Census — was sponsored by the U.S. Census Bureau. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are private, nonprofit institutions that provide independent, objective analysis and advice to the nation to solve complex problems and inform public policy decisions related to science, engineering, and medicine. They operate under an 1863 congressional charter to the National Academy of Sciences, signed by President Lincoln.