Updating the U.S. Census Bureau's Master Address File via Administrative Records

• Activity Number: 142
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 5, 2013 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Government Statistics Section
• Author(s): Christine Tomaszewski and Kathleen Kephart*+
• Companies: US Census Bureau and US Census Bureau
• Keywords: Administrative Records ; Address Matching ; Targeted Address Canvassing ; Census Coverage ; Census 2010 ; Address List Maintenance

Abstract

The U.S. Census Bureau's Master Address File (MAF) is a national address list used for the decennial census. As the first major field operation of the 2010 Census, the 2010 Address Canvassing Operation was important to provide an accurate address inventory for the census enumeration operations, which reduces census costs. It was one of the largest dependent address listing operations in the world, costing $845 million (Holland, 2012), and procedures need to be developed to avoid similarly expensive field operations for future address list updates and maintenance. Administrative Records (AR) offer a heretofore untapped but highly cost effective approach to updating and maintaining the MAF between the Decennial Censuses. Using AR to update the MAF may reduce the scope of or need for future field operations to update the MAF. For this research, the Census Bureau matched 225 million addresses from the MAF to over 150 million addresses in the 2007 and 2008 Statistical AR System.