Adjusting the 1980 Census of Population and Housing

原文摘要

In 1980, several cities and states sued the U.S. Census Bureau to correct census results. This correction would adjust for the differential undercounting of Blacks and Hispanics, especially in cities. In this article, the authors, each of whom testified for New York City and State in their joint lawsuit against the Census Bureau, describe the likely pattern of the undercount and present a method to adjust for it. We first explain why the undercount is concentrated among minority populations living in large cities. We describe the demographic and survey data available for adjustment from the Census Bureau's Post Enumeration Program. We present adjustment results obtained by two simple methods—synthetic estimation, and sample estimation for a few large subclasses. The Census Bureau used the latter method, known as the National Vacancy Check, to adjust the results of the 1970 census. We also describe our regression-based, composite method for adjustment. This method takes sample estimates of the undercount rate for a set of mutually exclusive geographic areas, and regresses these estimates upon available predictor variables. The composite estimates of the undercount rate are matrix-weighted averages of the original sample and regression estimates. We compute estimates for 66 areas: 16 large cities, the remainders of the 12 states in which those cities are located, and 38 whole states. As expected, we find that the highest undercount rates are in large cities, and the lowest are in states and state remainders with small percentages of Blacks and Hispanics. Next, we analyze how sensitive our estimates are to changes in data and modeling assumptions. We find that these changes do not affect the estimates very much. Our conclusion is that regardless of whether we use one of the simple methods or the composite method and regardless of how we vary the assumptions of the composite method, an adjustment reliably reduces population shares in states with few minorities and increases the shares of large cities.

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