Review: Census takers relied more on proxies in rural US
In Alaska, West Virginia and other mostly rural states, census takers relied more on the word of neighbors, landlords and others for information about a home’s residents. In New Jersey, New York and other more densely populated states in the Mid-Atlantic region, they were more likely to come away from a household lacking basic information on race, sex and ethnic background.
An Associated Press review of the first data-quality measurements released by the U.S. Census Bureau last month shows early patterns that may point to red flags in the data that could emerge when more detailed numbers are released in August.
Poor quality data can diminish the political power and resources available to communities across the country: Children who are missed in the census deprive communities of money for building schools, and undercounting racial or ethnic minorities prevents them from forming minority-majority political districts.
The bureau released data quality measurements last month as part of an effort to engender confidence in the numbers following a head count challenged by the spread of the new coronavirus, concerns about politicization by the Trump administration and natural disasters. The bureau also is allowing outside statisticians to perform quality checks.
The measurements include state-by-state breakdowns of rates of households that answered the census questionnaire on their own, the percentage of households where a member answered a census taker’s questions and the rate of households where information was gathered from administrative records from agencies like the IRS or Social Security Administration. Answers gathered from these methods are considered higher quality than proxies and population-only counts.
Besides Alaska and West Virginia, other rural states that had the highest rates of household answers coming from proxies included Maine, Montana, Vermont and New Mexico. In these states, census takers relied on information from proxies for between almost a quarter and a third of households. Nationally, the rate was 18.2%.
While it’s too early to reach any conclusions about the fairness or accuracy of the 2020 count, the correlation between the high use of proxies and the fact these states had large numbers of households covered by this operation “raises an important red flag,” said Steven Romalewski, director of the CUNY Mapping Service.
When it came to households where census takers only got a head count without demographic information, the national rate was a 5.9%. But it was higher for states in the Mid-Atlantic region as well as the District of Columbia. It ranged between almost 8% and 12% for the District of Columbia, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware.
In a statement, the Census Bureau confirmed the findings of the AP review.