A new report from the National Academies, “Assessing the 2020 Census,” looked at �the quality of the 2020 Census and its constituent operations, drawing appropriate comparisons with prior censuses.� Among the failures identified by the report were:
Coverage and quality gaps �between different racial and ethnic groups compared to the 2010 census. In the 2020 census, net overcounts increased for White and Asian people, while net undercounts increased substantially for Hispanic people, Black people, and American Indians on reservations.�
Poor data quality as indicated by �age heaping,� a term for �unusually high levels of reporting of ages ending in 0 or 5, as occurs when roughly estimating a person�s age.� The report suggested �that this age heaping was particularly pronounced in 2020 relative to the 2010 census and was largely a function of proxy reporting of census information for nonresponding households, such as from a neighbor or landlord.�
The “new and untested approach to protecting the confidentiality of census data� also contributed to data quality concerns. �In the very late stages of 2020 census planning, the Census Bureau decided to replace its methods for confidentiality protection with an entirely new approach that had not been tested, prototyped, or deployed in the population census context. While confidentiality protection is a critically important responsibility of a statistical agency, the report says, this decision was made without appropriate consideration regarding the utility of resulting census data products to fulfill the many important functions of census data. The new methods for confidentiality protection were not ready for use in 2020 census production and substantially degraded the value of the 2020 census data products in terms of timeliness and quality.�
While acknowledging �the extraordinary challenges the Census Bureau faced in conducting the census,� the report encouraged greater R&D and building better partnerships with stakeholders for the 2030 Census.
The Hill and NPR looked further into the report and its conclusions.
