Inaccuracies fog up results

Despite efforts to record every person in the nation, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that millions of mistakes are made each census period, particularly in surveys relating to metropolitan cities and college students.

Several factors can lead to such erroneous data, senior media specialist for the local census office in Oakland Sonny Le said, including masses of people choosing not to participate or residents being counted twice.

College students living on their own, for instance, make up a group of people that are commonly double-counted, Jael Myrick, field representative from the office of Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley) said.

These students are often confused about whether they should be included in their family's census at home in San Francisco, for instance, or whether they should register from their rented apartment in Miami.

Myrick said students should respond based on the place of residence where they spend most of their time, which the bureau equates to at least six months and one day of the year.

That error, usually found in students age 18-24, Le said, is only one of many potential inaccuracies encompassing the large system.

Analysis of the quality of the decennial survey in a report by the U.S. Census Monitoring Board names three components of errors: omissions, erroneous inclusions and non-data defined persons.

Omissions are residents completely missed, according to the report, and erroneous inclusions are people who were either counted twice, in the wrong place or should not have been counted at all.

Reasons include the use of fictitious names, children born after April 1 and people who died before April 1. Non-data defined persons are computer-generated estimates of household characteristics, the report said.

According to statistics found on the U.S. Census Bureau's official Web site, massive errors made in previous censuses resulted in a net undercount of 4 million residents in 1990 and similarly, 3.3 million residents in the year 2000.

Both undercounts and overcounts skew demographics and geographic profiles, impacting the nation negatively, Le said, because policymakers base their decisions on these adjusted results.

The government's scientific method in collecting census figures is by mailing the forms to each housing unit and asking residents to send it back, truthfully indicating how many people are living in the quarters.

But despite the number of undercounts and double-counts likely, this procedure is "the best tool we have at this point" to determine the nation's head count, Le said.

It is an especially challenging job when residents do not respond immediately by mail, because the federal government subsequently spends millions of dollars in census workers going house-to-house to locate those people, he said.

"We really cannot afford to even miss 2 percent (of the population), because it essentially is the lifeline of these communities, by determining funding for public services," Le said.

Those difficult to reach, also coined the "hard-to-count population," typically include residents with low literacy abilities or limited English-speakers, immigrants, the undocumented work force and the homeless, he said.

These communities do not understand the importance of participation, Le said, which is why community outreach is needed in such areas.

Larger cities are hurt more by the census, according to a study by the Pew Charitable Trusts in 2009, because the prevalence of these groups leads to considerably high undercounts.

By not being included in the census, however, this results in the given county suffering from a disproportionate amount of federal funding to provide the high demanded social services that these people need.

Pedro Rosado, district representative from the office of Sen. Loni Hancock (D-Oakland), said that one of the reasons why California is generally undercounted is because there is an ever-present population of illegal citizens.

Even though these people may not be officially documented through legal employment, their presence still contributes to the state's economy by consumerism and their payment of sales tax, for instance, Rosado said.

Contact Holly Pablo at hpablo.advocate@gmail.com