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Attempts by the bureau’s workers to conduct in-person interviews for the census will end on Sept. 30 — not Oct. 31, the end date it indicated in April would be necessary to count every person living in the U.S. given major setbacks from the coronavirus pandemic. Three Census Bureau employees, who were informed of the plans during separate internal meetings Thursday, confirmed the new end date with NPR. All of the employees spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of losing their jobs…
Former Census Bureau Director John Thompson warns that with less time, the bureau would likely have to reduce the number of attempts door knockers would make to try to gather information in person. The agency may also have to rely more heavily on statistical methods to impute the data about people living in households they can’t reach.
“The end result would be [overrepresentation] for the White non-Hispanic population and greater undercounts for all other populations including the traditionally hard-to-count,” Thompson wrote in written testimony for a Wednesday hearing on the census before the House Oversight and Reform Committee…
Moving up the end date from Oct. 31 for door knocking is likely to throw the census, already upended by months of delays, deeper into turmoil as hundreds of thousands of the bureau’s door knockers try to figure out how to conduct in-person interviews as many states grapple with growing coronavirus outbreaks in the middle of hurricane season.
Beyond the political football that the Census can be, Census data is important for researchers, residents, and political leaders. Not being able to go through the full data process and having to impute more data means that more of the final counts will need to be estimated. Since the decennial Census tries to get data from every household in the United States, it has some of the most comprehensive data. Lower counts, less time, COVID-19, political wrangling – may this not disturb useful and important data results.
