Tag: technology and the census

2020 Or Bust: Halfway to the Next Count (No Fooling!)

Census Project Co-Director Terri Ann LowenthalBy Terri Ann Lowenthal

I have seven words for Congress as it considers the president’s Fiscal Year 2015 budget request: Remember the Affordable Care Act website launch!

I know. You do not want to be reminded of that painful chapter in President Obama’s signature program. But didn’t someone once say, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it?” For some reason, I am stuck on historical quips today.

Six years from now, tens of millions of American households will be firing up their desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones to answer the census paper-free. And the 2020 Census website has to work like a charm. Right away. Because unlike the new healthcare law, there can be no deadline extensions, no months-long fixes, no do-overs, in the middle of a census. The more people that answer the census in the final weeks of March and first weeks of April, the more accurate the data — pegged to April 1, 2020 — will be.

If history is any guide, a third of us won’t respond on our own. Then begins the nonresponse follow-up slog, with an army of census takers knocking on doors and coaxing the forgetful, recalcitrant and fearful remainder into answering a handful of simple questions. In another decennial first, these temporary workers will record answers on electronic gadgets, either government-issued or their own.

A recent Time magazine cover story chronicled how a group of “high-tech wizards” came together last October to fix the troubled health care website in six weeks. That’s all well and good. But it can’t happen during a decennial census. How many people will say “the heck with this,” if the 2020 Census website balks when they try to log on and fill out their form? How many will shut the door if a census taker’s tablet goes on the fritz mid-interview? We don’t want to find out the hard way.

People lost confidence, for a good many months, in healthcare.gov and, by extension, the entire Affordable Care Act. They started returning to the website in larger numbers in the early months of 2014. (Nevertheless, as the deadline for enrollment loomed yesterday, “software bugs” took the website down temporarily again!) Confidence lost is hard — and costly — to win back. The Census Bureau will not have the luxury of rebound time.

The administration’s goal for ACA enrollees was 7 million in the first year. The Census Bureau has to count 130 million households — 330 million people — and tabulate the results for congressional reapportionment. In nine months. The Constitution requires it.

At this point, you might be saying to yourself that the Census Bureau has offered an Internet response option for the American Community Survey, an ongoing part of the decennial census, for over a year. More than 50 percent of households in the survey are now responding online — a hopeful sign, to be sure. But the ACS samples fewer than 300,000 addresses a month. A system that can handle 150,000 online forms doesn’t tell us what we need to know about one that will need to manage (if we’re lucky) upwards of 8 million hits a day during peak census operations. Talk about scaling up!

Did I mention telephone assistance? Anticipated call volume from the public and census staff, coupled with outgoing calls to conduct interviews, may overwhelm a centralized call center, the bureau says. It’s time to start hatching a “hybrid” or decentralized plan.

The mid-decade year marks the start of the operational development and systems testing phase for 2020. Contracting offices must be up and running in 2015, with research and development teams ready to define requirements for more than 30 interrelated IT systems needed to run the nation’s largest peacetime mobilization. Let’s not kid ourselves: the Census Bureau had trouble in this department during the last go-round, abandoning plans to use handheld devices in the field at the eleventh hour. Congress had to fork over an extra $2 billion. This time, the bureau has to get it right.

Greater use of technology is just one component of this decade’s major census-process overhaul. Previous budget cuts and sequestration delayed or cancelled field tests and research into innovative, but complex, counting methods and pushed back key design decisions. The clock is ticking, and time will not wait for the Census Bureau to catch up.

So, lawmakers can invest now in the testing and systems development (and more testing!) required to field a modern census on time and within budget. Or they can pinch pennies and say a prayer that the legislature in which they serve is reapportioned fairly and on time. The Census Bureau knows how to count people with paper and pencils; do you have $20 billion to spare? I didn’t think so. Halfway through the decade, $689 million seems like a reasonable stake in a more cost-effective census that works.

An Internet Census and the Digital Divide

by Terri Ann Lowenthal

In my last post, I gave a shout-out to my father, who I fear could be overlooked by a largely electronic census, given dad’s likely nonagenarian status in 2020. Older Americans uncomfortable with today’s gadgets are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to population groups that the Census Bureau might have difficulty reaching through the Internet.

It does seem like everyone is walking around with a smartphone glued to their ear, or reading their news or the latest Stephen King novel on a tablet. But the hard facts — gleaned from a Census Bureau survey on Internet usage — tell a different story.

In Exploring the Digital Nation: Home Broadband Internet Adoption in the United States, the Commerce Department reported that more than three-fourths (77 percent) of U.S. households own a computer, be it handheld or sitting on a desk or lap. But computer ownership and broadband adoption are not spread evenly across household income levels, race and ethnicity, age, level of education, disability status, and geographic location.

Consider a few of the reports specific findings:

  • Seventy-three percent of urban (metropolitan area) households use the Internet, compared to 62 percent in rural (non-metropolitan area) households. Seventy percent of urban households have broadband access; 57 percent of rural households do.
  • More than four-fifths of Asian households and roughly three-quarters of non-Hispanic White households use the Internet. Less than 60 percent of Black, American Indian and Alaska Native, and Hispanic households can access the Internet at home.
  • Forty-six percent of households with incomes below $25,000 have home Internet access, compared to 84 percent of households in the $50,000 – $75,000 income bracket. There also are significant broadband adoption differences by household income: Nearly 90 percent of households in the $75,000 – $100,000 income range access the Internet using broadband; only 43 percent of households in under-$25,000 group do.
  • Less than half of household heads with a disability use the Internet, compared to three-quarters of those without a disability.

A more fine-grained analysis of the data revealed greater variability by socio-economic characteristic; the department reported, for example, that less than 30 percent of Black rural homes whose head of household lacked a high school diploma use a computer. Commerce Under Secretary (and Deputy Secretary-designate) Rebecca Blank told reporters at a press briefing (11/8/11) that the large gaps in access to broadband and Internet use were “striking and not something we expected to see.”

For census apostles, the most worrisome aspect of the disparate access to computers and reliable Internet is that, to a significant degree, many population groups lagging behind technologically are historically harder to count in the census and prone to disproportionate undercounts. Furthermore, a quarter of households without Internet access cite affordability as a major barrier to this service. Current economic trends do not favor better financial circumstances for lower income households.

Earlier this fall, I mused about the lightening pace of technological change, which will present significant challenges for the Census Bureau as it designs a less-costly enumeration for 2020 over an eight-year span. No doubt, access to computers and the Internet will increase across all demographic subgroups with time. But as new technologies emerge, differential access to those tools is likely to persist.

All of these factors pose significant challenges for the Census Bureau, as it tries to balance the obvious advantages technology offers for ease of participation, operational efficiency and cost containment, with the need to count people who cannot or will not respond electronically. (To complicate the census planning process, U.S. Postal Service budget woes might slow the delivery of first-class mail across the country; Saturday delivery might also be a historical footnote by decade’s end.)

So, yes, I agree with Census Director Robert Groves that 2020 must be a “multi-mode census. … We must move beyond the mailback questionnaire and the personal interview … to ensure that the response options for the census reflect the communication platforms that people are using.” (Testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, Federal Services, and International Security, April 6, 2011.) But some of those modes will be more costly and traditional than others, and Congress must be mindful of the digital divide as it decides how much money to spend on planning and execution of the next decennial count.

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From the Census Project family to yours:
Happy holidays and best wishes for 2012!
(REMEMBER: The next census is only eight years away!)

Time to Get Down to (Census) Business

by Terri Ann Lowenthal

Is anyone else weary of handicapping the Republican presidential field, or hearing about Amanda Knox (I’m glad she’s home) and Dr. Conrad Murray (MJ and I were born six weeks apart, so you know where my sympathies lie)? Good. Time to start thinking about Census 2020 planning instead.

At a Senate hearing last spring, Census Director Robert Groves laid out the agency’s guiding principles for designing the next decennial count. At the core of all of them is the stark fiscal reality facing the country: the Census Bureau will have to do more with much less. As in far fewer dollars to spend. More people, more housing units, more complex household structures, more language and cultural diversity. All for less money than in 2010. Have I mentioned that Senate appropriators think the Census Bureau could do the job for the price of the 2000 model (without adjusting for inflation)? Good luck with that.

Anyway, over the coming months, I’ll take a look at the eight guideposts Dr. Groves said are based on lessons learned from the 2010 count, offering some historical context and thoughts on key issues the bureau should consider in pursuing each goal. I’ll start today by repeating the underlying point from my post on Sept. 28: No matter how little it is willing to spend on the 2020 census over the long haul, Congress must invest some money upfront for research, testing and design development. The alternative will tie the agency’s hands behind its back until it is too late for meaningful innovation, end-to-end testing to support outcome-based decisions, and timely interaction with community-based partners.

I’ll close for now with another news headline of greater import to the census. As I write this blog post on my iPad and contemplate the untimely passing of Apple’s Steve Jobs, I am reminded of the speed with which technology has evolved and improved in only the last decade. Apple unveiled the iPhone in 2007, a mere four years ago. Is it just me, or does it seem like that gadget has been around forever? Director Groves has rightly highlighted the need for a multiple-mode 2020 census, expanding enumeration methods beyond the traditional (since 1960) “mail, hail, or fail” playbook. His Senate testimony (April 6, 2011) notes that response options must “reflect the communication platforms that people are using.” Well said, but difficult to actualize when you consider that my iPad was overrun by iPad2 within a year. Congress must give the Census Bureau sufficient resources to have technology visionaries in the room as planning for 2020 unfolds.