Full Report of the Comparisons of Administrative Record Rosters to Census Self-Responses and NRFU Household Member Responses
March 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-08
Abstract
One of the U.S. Census Bureau's innovations in the 2020 U.S. Census was the use of administrative records (AR) to create household rosters for enumerating some addresses when a self response was not available but high-quality ARs were. The goal was to reduce the cost of fieldwork during the Nonresponse Followup operation (NRFU). The original plan had NRFU beginning in mid-May and continuing through late July 2020. However, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the delay of NRFU and caused the Internal Revenue Service to postpone the income tax filing deadline, resulting in an interruption in the delivery of ARs to the U.S. Census Bureau. The delays were not anticipated when U.S. Census Bureau staff conducted the research on AR enumeration with the 2010 Census data in preparation for the 2020 Census or during the fine tuning of plans for using ARs during the 2018 End-to-End Census Test. These circumstances raised questions about whether the quality of the AR household rosters was high enough for use in enumeration. To aid in investigating the concern about the quality of the AR rosters, our analyses compared AR rosters to self-response rosters and NRFU household member responses at addresses where both ARs and a self-response were available.
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