The Use of Administrative Records and the American Community Survey to Study the Characteristics of Undercounted Young Children in the 2010 Census
May 2018
Working Paper Number:
carra-2018-05
Abstract
Children under age five are historically one of the most difficult segments of the population to enumerate in the U.S. decennial census. The persistent undercount of young children is highest among Hispanics and racial minorities. In this study, we link 2010 Census data to administrative records from government and third party data sources, such as Medicaid enrollment data and tenant rental assistance program records from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to identify differences between children reported and not reported in the 2010 Census. In addition, we link children in administrative records to the American Community Survey to identify various characteristics of households with children under age five who may have been missed in the last census. This research contributes to what is known about the demographic, socioeconomic, and household characteristics of young children undercounted by the census. Our research also informs the potential benefits of using administrative records and surveys to supplement the U.S. Census Bureau child population enumeration efforts in future decennial censuses.
Document Tags and Keywords
Keywords
Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative
keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant
keywords.
By analyzing the content of working papers, KeyBERT identifies terms and phrases that capture the essence of the
text, highlighting the most significant topics and trends. This approach not only enhances searchability but
provides connections that go beyond potentially domain-specific author-defined keywords.
:
census data,
census research,
respondent,
survey,
minority,
hispanic,
ethnicity,
imputation,
record,
disadvantaged,
population,
enrollment,
citizen,
neighborhood,
census bureau,
medicaid,
resident,
family,
census use,
census survey,
2010 census,
census records,
child
Tags
Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at
several tasks, including entity tagging.
The model is able to label words and phrases by part-of-speech,
including "organizations." By filtering for frequent words and phrases labeled as "organizations", papers are
identified to contain references to specific institutions, datasets, and other organizations.
:
Internal Revenue Service,
Housing and Urban Development,
Social Security,
Department of Housing and Urban Development,
American Community Survey,
Protected Identification Key,
Computer Assisted Personal Interview,
2020 Census,
Indian Health Service,
Computer Assisted Telephone Interviews and Computer Assisted Personal Interviews,
Centers for Medicare,
MAFID
Similar Working Papers
Similarity between working papers are determined by an unsupervised neural
network model
know as Doc2Vec.
Doc2Vec is a model that represents entire documents as fixed-length vectors, allowing for the
capture of semantic meaning in a way that relates to the context of words within the document. The model learns to
associate a unique vector with each document while simultaneously learning word vectors, enabling tasks such as
document classification, clustering, and similarity detection by preserving the order and structure of words. The
document vectors are compared using cosine similarity/distance to determine the most similar working papers.
Papers identified with 🔥 are in the top 20% of similarity.
The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'The Use of Administrative Records and the American Community Survey to Study the Characteristics of Undercounted Young Children in the 2010 Census' are listed below in order of similarity.
-
Working PaperWhen Race and Hispanic Origin Reporting are Discrepant Across Administrative Records and Third Party Sources: Exploring Methods to Assign Responses🔥
December 2015
Working Paper Number:
carra-2015-08
The U.S. Census Bureau is researching uses of administrative records and third party data in survey and decennial census operations. One potential use of administrative records is to utilize these data when race and Hispanic origin responses are missing. When federal and third party administrative records are compiled, race and Hispanic origin responses are not always the same for an individual across sources. We explore different methods to assign one race and one Hispanic response when these responses are discrepant. We also describe the characteristics of individuals with matching, non-matching, and missing race and Hispanic origin data by demographic, household, and contextual variables. We find that minorities, especially Hispanics, are more likely to have non-matching Hispanic origin and race responses in administrative records and third party data compared to the 2010 Census. Minority groups and individuals ages 0-17 are more likely to have missing race or Hispanic origin data in administrative records and third party data. Larger households tend to have more missing race data in administrative records and third party data than smaller households.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperExploring Administrative Records Use for Race and Hispanic Origin Item Non-Response🔥
December 2014
Working Paper Number:
carra-2014-16
Race and Hispanic origin data are required to produce official statistics in the United States. Data collected through the American Community Survey and decennial census address missing data through traditional imputation methods, often relying on information from neighbors. These methods work well if neighbors share similar characteristics, however, the shape and patterns of neighborhoods in the United States are changing. Administrative records may provide more accurate data compared to traditional imputation methods for missing race and Hispanic origin responses. This paper first describes the characteristics of persons with missing demographic data, then assesses the coverage of administrative records data for respondents who do not answer race and Hispanic origin questions in Census data. The paper also discusses the distributional impact of using administrative records race and Hispanic origin data to complete missing responses in a decennial census or survey context.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperProducing U.S. Population Statistics Using Multiple Administrative Sources🔥
November 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-58
We identify several challenges encountered when constructing U.S. administrative record-based (AR-based) population estimates for 2020. Though the AR estimates are higher than the 2020 Census at the national level, they are over 15 percent lower in 5 percent of counties, suggesting that locational accuracy can be improved. Other challenges include how to achieve comprehensive coverage, maintain consistent coverage across time, filter out nonresidents and people not alive on the reference date, uncover missing links across person and address records, and predict demographic characteristics when multiple ones are reported or when they are missing. We discuss several ways of addressing these issues, e.g., building in redundancy with more sources, linking children to their parents' addresses, and conducting additional record linkage for people without Social Security Numbers and for addresses not initially linked to the Census Bureau's Master Address File. We discuss modeling to predict lower levels of geography for people lacking those geocodes, the probability that a person is a U.S. resident on the reference date, the probability that an address is the person's residence on the reference date, and the probability a person is in each demographic characteristic category. Regression results illustrate how many of these challenges and solutions affect the AR county population estimates.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperComparison of Child Reporting in the American Community Survey and Federal Income Tax Returns Based on California Birth Records🔥
September 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-55
This paper takes advantage of administrative records from California, a state with a large child population and a significant historical undercount of children in Census Bureau data, dependent information in the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Form 1040 records, and the American Community Survey to characterize undercounted children and compare child reporting. While IRS Form 1040 records offer potential utility for adjusting child undercounting in Census Bureau surveys, this analysis finds overlapping reporting issues among various demographic and economic groups. Specifically, older children, those of Non-Hispanic Black mothers and Hispanic mothers, children or parents with lower English proficiency, children whose mothers did not complete high school, and families with lower income-to-poverty ratio were less frequently reported in IRS 1040 records than other groups. Therefore, using IRS 1040 dependent records may have limitations for accurately representing populations with characteristics associated with the undercount of children in surveys.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperCoverage and Agreement of Administrative Records and 2010 American Community Survey Demographic Data🔥
November 2014
Working Paper Number:
carra-2014-14
The U.S. Census Bureau is researching possible uses of administrative records in decennial census and survey operations. The 2010 Census Match Study and American Community Survey (ACS) Match Study represent recent efforts by the Census Bureau to evaluate the extent to which administrative records provide data on persons and addresses in the 2010 Census and 2010 ACS. The 2010 Census Match Study also examines demographic response data collected in administrative records. Building on this analysis, we match data from the 2010 ACS to federal administrative records and third party data as well as to previous census data and examine administrative records coverage and agreement of ACS age, sex, race, and Hispanic origin responses. We find high levels of coverage and agreement for sex and age responses and variable coverage and agreement across race and Hispanic origin groups. These results are similar to findings from the 2010 Census Match Study.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperEvaluating Race and Hispanic Origin Responses of Medicaid Participants Using Census Data🔥
April 2015
Working Paper Number:
carra-2015-01
Health and health care disparities associated with race or Hispanic origin are complex and continue to challenge researchers and policy makers. With the intention of improving the measurement and monitoring of these disparities, provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010 require states to collect, report and analyze data on demographic characteristics of applicants and participants in Medicaid and other federally supported programs. By linking Medicaid records to 2010 Census, American Community Survey, and Census 2000, this new large-scale study examines and documents the extent to which pre-ACA Medicaid administrative records match self-reported race and Hispanic origin in Census data. Linked records allow comparisons between individuals with matching and non-matching race and Hispanic origin data across several demographic, socioeconomic and neighborhood characteristics, such as age, gender, language proficiency, education and Census tract variables. Identification of the groups most likely to have non-matching and missing race and Hispanic origin data in Medicaid relative to Census data can inform strategies to improve the quality of demographic data collected from Medicaid populations.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperCoverage of Children in the American Community Survey Based on California Birth Records🔥
September 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-46
The U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS) collects information on individuals and households. The ACS provides survey-based estimates of children drawn from a sample of the U.S. population. However, survey responses may not match administrative records, such as birth records. Birth records should provide a complete account of all births, along with child-parent relationships and demographic characteristics. California is a state that has both a large population of children and a high undercount for young children. This paper uses California as a case study to examine differences between reported versus unreported children in the ACS based on state birth records. Child reporting rates were lower for more recent data years, younger children, for Black and Hispanic mothers, and for more complex households. Child reporting rates were higher for more educated mothers and for households above the poverty line. Using mother's race and Hispanic ethnicity from the birth records combined with poverty indices from the ACS, this analysis also finds that child reporting does not uniformly vary with poverty status across all race and ethnicity groups. This research builds support for the utility of state birth records in analyzing the undercount of children.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperFull 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
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.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperNoncitizen Coverage and Its Effects on U.S. Population Statistics🔥
August 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-42
We produce population estimates with the same reference date, April 1, 2020, as the 2020 Census of Population and Housing by combining 31 types of administrative record (AR) and third-party sources, including several new to the Census Bureau with a focus on noncitizens. Our AR census national population estimate is higher than other Census Bureau official estimates: 1.8% greater than the 2020 Demographic Analysis high estimate, 3.0% more than the 2020 Census count, and 3.6% higher than the vintage-2020 Population Estimates Program estimate. Our analysis suggests that inclusion of more noncitizens, especially those with unknown legal status, explains the higher AR census estimate. About 19.8% of AR census noncitizens have addresses that cannot be linked to an address in the 2020 Census collection universe, compared to 5.7% of citizens, raising the possibility that the 2020 Census did not collect data for a significant fraction of noncitizens residing in the United States under the residency criteria used for the census. We show differences in estimates by age, sex, Hispanic origin, geography, and socioeconomic characteristics symptomatic of the differences in noncitizen coverage.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperPredicting the Effect of Adding a Citizenship Question to the 2020 Census🔥
June 2019
Working Paper Number:
CES-19-18
The addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census could affect the self-response rate, a key driver of the cost and quality of a census. We find that citizenship question response patterns in the American Community Survey (ACS) suggest that it is a sensitive question when asked about administrative record noncitizens but not when asked about administrative record citizens. ACS respondents who were administrative record noncitizens in 2017 frequently choose to skip the question or answer that the person is a citizen. We predict the effect on self-response to the entire survey by comparing mail response rates in the 2010 ACS, which included a citizenship question, with those of the 2010 census, which did not have a citizenship question, among households in both surveys. We compare the actual ACS-census difference in response rates for households that may contain noncitizens (more sensitive to the question) with the difference for households containing only U.S. citizens. We estimate that the addition of a citizenship question will have an 8.0 percentage point larger effect on self-response rates in households that may have noncitizens relative to those with only U.S. citizens. Assuming that the citizenship question does not affect unit self-response in all-citizen households and applying the 8.0 percentage point drop to the 28.1 % of housing units potentially having at least one noncitizen would predict an overall 2.2 percentage point drop in self-response in the 2020 census, increasing costs and reducing the quality of the population count.View Full Paper PDF
