Decennial Census Return Rates: The Role of Social Capital
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-39
Abstract
This paper explores how useful information about social and civic engagement (social capital)
might be to the U.S. Census Bureau in their efforts to improve predictions of mail return rates for the Decennial Census (DC) at the census tract level. Through construction of Hard-to-count (HRC) scores and multivariate analysis, we find that if information about social capital were available, predictions of response rates would be marginally improved.
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estimating,
statistical,
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survey,
respondent,
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expenditure,
regressors,
federal,
percentile,
population,
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socioeconomic,
census bureau,
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