Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place Residence Rules in the Decennial Census (2006) / Chapter Skim
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III Improvements for the Future - 6 Residence Principles for the Decennial Census
III Improvements for the Future - 6 Residence Principles for the Decennial Census
Pages 179-224
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From page 179... ...
Part III Improvements for the Future
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As we have noted, residence concepts were a primary focus of the 2005 census test and will be the topic of a further mailout experiment in 2006. Also, as witnessed in our panel's public meetings, the Census Bureau has made good strides in redrafting and revising both the census residence rules and the definitions of group quarters.
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From page 182... ...
They have primarily been regarded as an internal Census Bureau reference, but also must be adaptable to the construction and phrasing of items on the census form and must govern the design of related census operations. They must also be a resource for the training of temporary census enumerators and a reference to census staff who must field questions from census respondents.
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From page 183... ...
stay of the majority of a year as the basic definition of usual residence. But that specificity is also a limitation, since 6 months is a coarse time interval with respect to some living situations; the third and fourth principles weaken the hard-line 6-months criterion, imparting some ambiguity in the determination of residence.
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3. If a person has strong ties to more than one residence, the Census Bureau should collect that information on the census form and subsequently attempt to resolve what constitutes the "usual residence." 4.
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When a usual residence cannot be determined, the person's location on Census Day -- the de facto residence location -- should be used.
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Another possible principle -- perhaps useful for handling some ambiguous residence situations but that may be prohibitively difficult operationally -- is to specify that children under a certain age must be counted at the home of their parent or guardian. Though it would provide an alternate solution to the current mismatch between the counting of boarding school and college students and could be more consistent with a "family" interpretation of household, the specification of the age cutoff could make enumeration of college students even more difficult.1 Collectively, our four suggested principles imply the exclusion of American citizens (nonmilitary and nongovernment employee)
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Other census operations for which residence principles should be kept in the forefront include: · development and implementation of unduplication algorithms, includ ing any revisions to the primary selection algorithm (used to screen and combine duplicate census questionnaires) and plans for "real-time" unduplication during the census process (we discuss this briefly in Sec tion 8B)
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Examples include: · College students living away from the parental home, in on-campus or off-campus housing · Boarding school students · People living away most of the time while working · People who split time between two or more residences (during the week, month, or year) , such as snowbirds, unmarried partners with separate residences, commuter workers, etc.
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tionnaire, and any follow-up mailings (e.g., reminder cards or the pro posed second/replacement questionnaire mailout) ; · refinement of the Bureau's routines for editing census data and imputing for nonresponse; · development of experiments to be performed during a decennial census and of formal evaluations of census operations; and · design of public outreach programs.
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From page 190... ...
· Census questionnaires must include space for technical features, such as a block for the mailing address and Master Address File identification number or spaces for enumerators or census clerks to code operational information as needed. Self-response questionnaires and their properties are a topic of vital research in statistics and survey methodology; indeed, the study of their properties has grown in importance with the availability of new technologies for survey administration such as automated telephone interviews and data collection through questionnaires on the Internet.
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From page 191... ...
Finding 6.1: Responses to self-administered census forms depend upon the visual layout and design of questionnaires as well as the actual wording of questions and residence cues. The Census Bureau's approach in recent decades has been to produce designs that try to find an elusive, optimal level of instructions and cues at the beginning of the questionnaire in order to try to get best compliance with Bureau residence standards.
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From page 192... ...
on a separate page immediately preceding the listing of household members in Question 1. The number of specific include/exclude categories is higher than the number used in 1960,3 though at least one "addition" comes from listing college students twice -- to list those living at home 3The Bureau's precedural history of the 1970 census suggests that, "if the enumerator found these instructions insufficient, he referred to a table of residence rules" for additional detail (U.S.
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The same instructions and basic format were also used on the "Were You Counted? " form that persons who believed they had been missed could return to the Census Bureau.
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194 ONCE, ONLY ONCE, AND IN THE RIGHT PLACE -- PAGE BREAK - Figure 6-2 Basic residence instructions and Question 1, 1970 census questionnaire NOTE: Space was provided for entering 8 names; only 2 are shown here.
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The include/exclude directions on the 1980 census form (see Figure 6-3) are identical to those used in 1970, save for the dropping of "servants or hired hands living here" as a category of persons to include and a somewhat clearer handling of the "everyone here is staying only temporarily" item.
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From page 196... ...
devotes the most physical space to the basic household membership question and associated instructions, filling an entire page in the questionnaire booklet. "Usual residence" is prominently described as the census standard at the top of the page -- although a reader's eye is arguably drawn more to the multiple lines of bold-face type introducing question 1a.
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From page 197... ...
The word "usual" does not appear anywhere in the instructions, though the working definition of usual residence as the place where one lives or stays most of the time is embodied in the last bullet point of both the include and exclude lists. Rather than "usual," one of the bulleted instructions introduces a different concept -- persons staying at the home on Census Day are to be counted there if they do not have another "permanent place to stay." In terms of physical layout, the 2000 form is different from its predecessors in that the largest part of the instructions for Question 1 (the include/exclude lists)
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198 ONCE, ONLY ONCE, AND IN THE RIGHT PLACE Figure 6-4 Basic residence question (Item 1) , 1990 census questionnaire
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Those respondents who wanted to cite specific reasons for including or excluding certain people were directed to a different page in the 1970 and 1980 questionnaires; the 1990 form gave two short lines after the coverage probe questions to write in responses. Mailed questionnaires that had "yes" or blank answers to these questions were flagged for follow-up by district office enumerators.
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200 ONCE, ONLY ONCE, AND IN THE RIGHT PLACE questionnaire census 1970 questions, probe Coverage 6-5 igureF
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6D.3 Foreign Census Questionnaires Appendix B summarizes the approaches taken by censuses in selected foreign countries, including the specific residence instructions and questions on the questionnaires. In terms of the presentation of concepts to respondents, some basic impressions from a review of these other censuses include the following: · Some national censuses have been able to develop layout and question wording in order to effectively guide respondents through a series of questions while economizing the amount of space devoted to instruc tions and the overall length of the questionnaire.
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. · It is not unusual for multiple residence questions to be asked and addi tional address information collected on the census form.
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Box 6-2 illustrates the specific roster instructions tested by the 2000 AQE, side by side with the residence question asked on the standard census form. The revised questionnaire constituted a bundle of at least 10 changes, from the bluntly worded "master" instruction statement (to count people "using our guidelines")
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: · Order of answer space: whether the question (and response box) appear before or after the instructions · Order of other components, including structure of include/exclude lists · Space allocated to questions: whether the question block is formatted to appear larger, vertically · Dominant graphic element: replacement of an illustration of a pen as a major visual element with the flow-promoting orange "Start Here" triangle · Summary categories in instructions: whether the instructions include a general summary category ("people who live here most of the time, even if they have somewhere else to live")
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Candidate sets of coverage probe questions were developed in advance of the test, and two sets of probes -- each consisting of one question intended to address possible situations of undercount and one about overcount (duplication) -- were also included in the tests.
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Modified 2004 Test Figure 6-7 Coverage treatment groups, 2005 National Census Test
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RESIDENCE PRINCIPLES FOR THE DECENNIAL CENSUS 207 (d) "Centralized" Approach (e)
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6E CHANGING THE STRATEGY: GETTING THE RIGHT RESIDENCE INFORMATION At the 1986 COPAFS residence rules conference, Mann (1987:5) commented on the fundamental difficulty of the Census Bureau's instructionbased method of collecting residence count information.
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RESIDENCE PRINCIPLES FOR THE DECENNIAL CENSUS 209 and 2)
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offered an alternative approach: "listing people where they are staying on the Census date but then regrouping them into their usual residence." Though "the outlined alternative would give the more reliable overall count," Hill concluded that it would not be feasible given the technology available in 1980 and 1990. Due to the "massive matching problems" involved with searching reported usual residence information against other census records, the count might be improved but "the reliability of the final geographic allocation might be worse." Based on our review of current survey methods, we favor an approach to the decennial census based on asking guided questions -- and multiple questions, as necessary -- rather than relying on instructions to convey complex definitions.
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We also emphasize that the same warning that applied to the development of specific residence rules applies here: just as it is confusing and undesirable to carve out a new residence rule for every possible living situation and population group, so too is it unwise to divide the task of deriving a household count across too many questions and categories. 6E.2 The Short Form Is Too Short In addition to a revised structure of the basic household count and listing question at the beginning of the census questionnaire, a fully questionbased strategy for gathering accurate residence information requires additional queries in the body of the questionnaire.
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Collecting information on another place of residence, if applicable, for all persons on the census form better equips the Census Bureau to determine where each individual should be counted, as well as making the structure of the census form's residence questions more consistent with real-life settings. The Census Bureau should strive to collect alternative residence (address)
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To be clear, we do not suggest by this recommendation that the decennial census questionnaire attempt to collect a complete residential history of each person in the household. Rather, what we suggest is that the census form allow the entry of a single street address of an ARE where a person may spend a significant portion of a week, month, or year.
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Although we conclude that universal provision for ARE reporting is the proper direction for the census to follow, we also recognize the need for testing and evaluation of new procedures before they are applied in the census; our recommendations in Section 6E.4 reflect these constraints. One of the coverage probes tested in the 2005 National Census Test (Figure 6-8, (b)
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Verifying Addresses Current census methodology makes the strong -- and sometimes erroneous -- assumption that the census questionnaire is properly delivered to the correct housing unit (and to the people who live there)
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; this is entirely consistent with the broader change in residence questions that we describe in the next section. Coverage and Housing Type Probes We are encouraged that the 2005 test suggests that the Census Bureau is considering adding separate coverage probe questions, which were absent on the streamlined 2000 census questionnaire.
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provide further opportunity to elicit residence information through questions rather than relying on a preamble of instructions. We note above that some of the probes used in the 2005 National Census Test are useful starts to follow-up questions to accompany a reported "any residence elsewhere" address.
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, but this is no longer so. The interactive voice response system appeared to perform badly in the 2003 National Census Test, and the Bureau acknowledged in June 2006 that it planned to scrap Internet data collection.8 There is reason to believe that a question-based mode of collecting residence information may be more robust to mode differences than an instruction-based model, because response to instructions may depend crucially on medium of administration.
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, the Bureau should test a questionbased approach as part of the experimentation program of the 2010 census, in order to provide a base of information for further research over the next decade and possible inclusion in 2020. Recommendation 6.5: In the 2010 census, the Census Bureau should conduct a major experiment to test a form that asks a sufficient number of residence questions to determine the res idence situation of each person, rather than requiring respon dents to follow complicated residence instructions in formu lating their answers.
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Since 1960, the questionnaires and their accompanying instructions have offered different guidance on exactly when the form is to be completed and returned: · Some households receiving the 1960 form in the mail were asked to re turn the form by mail, as part of a census experiment; the households that received those instructions were advised to "please mail the com pleted form within 3 days in the special envelope." · In the most explicit instruction given in this regard, the beginning in struction on the 1970 census questionnaire read, "Please fill it out and mail it back on Census Day, Wednesday, April 1, 1970." · The 1980 questionnaire adapted the 1970 instruction slightly; the initial instruction told the reader to "please fill out this official Census Form and mail it back on Census Day, Tuesday, April 1, 1980." Later in the instructions, this guidance was softened to mailing it back on Census Day "or as soon afterward as you can." · The 1990 instruction directly contradicted the notion of a resident count as of Census Day by urging responses prior to Census Day. The first page of the form declared, "Remember: Return the com pleted form by April 1, 1990," accompanied by the softer instruction to "please answer and return your form promptly."9 Despite this instruc tion, the census form still asked respondents to report their household members as of April 1 (as shown in Figure 6-4)
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Census 2000 form in the mail"; the letter asked the reader to "please fill it out and mail it in promptly."10 The 2000 census questionnaire itself contained no deadline or guidance on when the form should be completed and returned; a March 13, 2000, press release on the mailout of 98 million census forms noted only that "people are asked to mail the forms back as soon as possible."11 A week later, households received a follow-up postcard dated March 20 offering "sincere thanks" to those households that already returned the form; "if you have not, please fill out the form and mail it back as soon as possible."12 Both the letters and the public relations stance suggested by press releases suggested that the 2000 census forms were to be returned as promptly as possible, even if the return was made before the Census Day reference point used in the questionnaire. The effect of possibly failing to fully account for some births, deaths, moves, and displacements in the last week of March may be relatively small.
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A particular, vitally necessary improvement to this research is discussed in detail in the next chapter -- the need to use more small-scale experiments and field trials, rather than the current course of relying on either a very small number of cases in cognitive tests or on tens or hundreds of thousands of cases in census operational trials. The panel's review of the evolution of the census forms being developed for the 2005 and 2006 census tests, with an eye toward the final design of the 2010 census questionnaire, revealed that the forms are being developed on the basis of inadequate experimental evidence.
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RESIDENCE PRINCIPLES FOR THE DECENNIAL CENSUS 223 To achieve our recommended goals -- a small number of core residence principles and a question-based (not instruction-based) approach for gathering residence information -- the census short form will have to be longer than it currently is.
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