When are census counts improved by adjustment? - ARCHIVED

Articles and reports: 12-001-X198800214592

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There are persuasive arguments for and against adjustment of the U.S. decennial census counts, although many of them are based on political rather than technical considerations. The decision whether or not to adjust depends crucially on the method of adjustment. Moreover, should adjustment take place using say a synthetic-based or a regression-based method, at which level should this occur and how should aggregation and disaggregation proceed? In order to answer these questions sensibly, a model of undercount errors is needed which is “level-consistent” in the sense that it is preserved for areas at the national, state, county, etc. level. Such a model is proposed in this article; like subareas are identified with strata such that within a stratum the subareas’ adjustment factors have a common stratum mean and have variances inversely proportional to their census counts. By taking into account sampling of the areas (e.g., by dual-system estimation), empirical Bayes estimators that combine information from the stratum average and the sample value, can be constructed. These estimators are evaluated at the state level (51 states, including Washington, D.C.), and stratified on race/ethnicity (3 strata) using data from the 1980 postenumeration survey (PEP 3-8, for the noninstitutional population).

Issue Number: 1988002
Author(s): Cressie, Noel

Main Product: Survey Methodology

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PDFDecember 15, 1988

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