Characteristics of People Overcounted in the Census
Sarah K. Heimel
U.S. Census Bureau
The U.S. Census Bureau conducted the 23rd decennial census of the country's population in 2010. The goal of the decennial census is to count every housing unit and every person in the United States, once and only once. However, sometimes people or housing units get counted more than once. For instance, an apartment might initially be included twice in the census if two different unit designations (Apt A versus Apt 1) were received from two different address sources, but the Census Bureau has successfully implemented procedures that reduce and resolve such housing unit duplication. Duplication of persons is more complex and challenging to resolve than housing unit duplication due to the complexity of living situations as well as the privacy and confidentiality concerns that constrain any attempts to contact and followup with possible duplicates. Person duplication can occur for a variety of reasons; a child with divorced parents might have been counted in the census by each parent, while a person in jail would have been counted in the prison but also could have been counted by their family at home. In order to address the problem of person duplication, it is essential to understand characteristics of the people who we suspect were duplicated and characteristics of the living quarters where they were counted. Information presented in this paper will include the age of suspected duplicates from the 2010 Census, and comparisons of the two questionnaires where the same person was counted (such as the distance between each address, the number of people duplicated between the two addresses, and whether the same telephone number was provided on each return). By understanding the characteristics of duplicated people, we can continue to research how to prevent duplication on initial census enumerations and how to resolve the duplication that persists.
