Understanding the Quality of the 2020 Census Interim Report (2022) / Chapter Skim
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Delays in getting full appropriations in the years leading up to the census required resource prioritization and scaled back tests, and a late-stage attempt to add a question on citizenship to the 2020 Census questionnaire would raise widespread concern about the effects of the question on census response. But the most massive disruptions arose from the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing a complete stoppage in mid-March and significantly delayed resumption of census field operations at precisely the time that those operations would be entering high gear under the plan.
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Even more so than in previous decades, the nation and the full array of stakeholders in the decennial census face a daunting and difficult question relative to this particular census, conducted amidst circumstances so dire: Of what quality is the 2020 Census and its data? Recognizing the need for independent, external review to answer that question, the Census Bureau asked the JASON advisory group to make a quick, high-level assessment of its 2020 Census processes in January 2021 and worked with a task force formed by the American Statistical Association on the generation of 2020 Census quality indicators.
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We also review the major methods by which census error is usally measured and quality assessed, including comparison to external data sources (demographic analysis estimates, an independent postenumeration survey,2 administrative records data, and the results of the previous censuses among them) and detailed analysis of census process data.
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These latter Census Bureau-developed systems include the Census Review Analysis and Visualization Application (CRAVA) tool and other operational dashboards for review of census operations, the iCADE system used for paper data capture, and -- perhaps above all -- the Primus application for self-response via the Internet that stepped up to handle the full volume of 2020 Census Internet response with zero down time.
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in the post-enumeration survey used to assess census quality due to delayed field operations. The pandemic and the timing of lockdown orders necessarily made the already difficult problem of counting persons in group quarters like college dormitories, correctional facilities, and health care facilities vastly more difficult, and also complicated accurate counting in their surrounding communities (i.e., off-campus college populations and populations surrounding correctional facilities)
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despite several years of sound research alternatives, the abrupt July 2020 attempt to change the apportionment base to exclude undocumented immigrants (Presidential Memorandum for the Secretary of Commerce, 2020) , and the shifting end date of field operations due to Congressional inaction on extending statutory deadlines and legal rulings.
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But, by comparison, the Census Bureau committed to a differential privacy-based solution -- at its core, as implemented to date, involving adding statistical noise to almost every tabulated cell and synthesizing the census returns in full based on those noisy measurements -- in 2018 without a prototype or working system in place. More to the point, the solution was adopted without demonstrating that it is capable of handling the basic nature of census data and simultaneously addressing the needs of the broad user base of the decennial census.
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Task Force; we also acknowledge, and commend, the Census Bureau for its issuance of three rounds of 2020 Census Operational Quality Metrics alongside its data releases in 2021. There is still a great deal to be learned about the dynamics of the 2020 Census processes at the national and state levels through investigation of the data behind the ASA Task Force and Census Bureau Operational Quality Metric tabulations, before extending those analyses to finer geographic levels.
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conclusion that quality metrics below the state level would have to be subjected to differentially private disclosure avoidance -- and thus that these should not be published, lest too much of the global privacy-loss budget be consumed. It is our hope that the risk of complementary information disclosure will be reassessed in the coming months so that some detailed quality metrics are discussable in the public eye, so that the panel can "show its work" and say more than "trust us" as argument in our final report: Recommendation 4.1: The Census Bureau should work on ways to make 2020 Census data quality metrics publicly available at small-domain spatiotemporal resolutions, unperturbed by disclosure avoidance, to bolster confidence in the published tabulations.
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Historically, the Census Bureau's operational assessments and evaluations have been limited to high-level tabulations; the 2020 program should examine 2020 Census operations at finer levels of spatiotemporal and demographic resolution. The decennial census is foundational to the functioning of American democracy, and maintaining the public's trust in the census and its resulting data is a correspondingly high-stakes affair.
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