Abstract #301036

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JSM 2003 Abstract #301036
Activity Number: 408
Type: Topic Contributed
Date/Time: Wednesday, August 6, 2003 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
Sponsor: Section on Government Statistics
Abstract - #301036
Title: An Analysis of Census 2000 Surname Frequency
Author(s): Eric C. Newburger*+ and Matthew R. Falkenstein
Companies: U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Census Bureau
Address: Planning Research and Evaluation Division, Harwood, MD, 20776,
Keywords: race ; Hispanic origin
Abstract:

To improve race and ethnicity data on administrative records, the Census Bureau performed a match between Census 2000 and administrative records. For matched records, the census race and Hispanic origin data were attached to the corresponding administrative record. For nonmatched records a model was developed to impute race and Hispanic origin. A key component of the model was a surname list developed from Census 2000. Census 2000 was the first decennial census in which respondent names were captured to data files. This enables us to associate surnames with race and Hispanic origin. We examined only male respondents from Census 2000. We set a minimum occurrence of surname at 50, to eliminate any risk of Title 13 privacy violation. We found that certain surnames are so strongly associated with a race as to be extremely reliable predictors of race or ethnic Hispanic origin. We then analyzed the distribution of surnames by race, focusing on names that occur infrequently on Census 2000. Again, we concentrated only on male respondents to eliminate the bias that marriage could introduce. We examined surnames that occur less than 50 times, but present only aggregate results in

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