On top of uncertainty over the quality of the count, there’s the bureau’s “differential privacy” framework, which adds statistical noise by changing some numbers in the reported results in an effort to protect respondent privacy. That latter approach provides a last-resort way to count otherwise uncounted Americans, but isn’t considered as reliable as talking to people directly about how many people live at a address - particularly in places, like tribal communities, where administrative records can be spotty. Where census takers weren’t able to reach households directly, the bureau fell back on either asking neighbors for information or filling in the blanks with information from government records like tax forms. Those in-person follow-ups were expected to be particularly important in rural areas such as tribal communities, where the bureau chose not to send forms to postal customers who get their mail at P.O. Then, last summer, the spreading virus sabotaged the bureau’s efforts to follow up with in-person visits to people who hadn’t yet completed their census form. The decennial census, a massive undertaking under ideal conditions, was beset by a combination of politics and the pandemic, starting with an unsuccessful effort by the Trump administration to add a citizenship question to the census questionnaire, a move that critics worried could discourage responses by Hispanic and Latino Americans. “It is still the most complete count done for America.” What else you need to know: They’ve added this fuzziness, but the underlying data is there in the traditional way,” she said. “They did count everybody - the data is there. “Every time you think about your population, you have to have a caveat,” said Mary Craigle, the head of state government’s Census and Economic Information Center.Įven so, Craigle said, the census represents the nation’s most comprehensive statistical effort, as it has since the time of the United States’ founding fathers. That imprecision is likely to apply especially to block-by-block statistics, as well as in rural areas with a few hundred residents or fewer. The newly released data isn’t necessarily a precise depiction of Montana’s communities, given the disruption wrought on the census effort by the pandemic and the bureau’s decision to add statistical noise to published counts in an effort to protect the privacy of respondents. More detailed data on age distributions and gender counts will be available at a later date. Thursday’s release includes figures for geographic units as small as individual city blocks, tallying the number of residents, their racial identity, and how many are above the voting age of 18.
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