The Right to Remain Silent? Public Opinion About the Use of Administrative Records to Obtain Missing Information for the Decennial Census (303378)

Keywords: administrative records, privacy, confidentiality, ethics, public opinion, telephone survey, U.S. Census Bureau

If your household did not return a census form in 2020, do you feel it would or would not be an invasion of your privacy to use information from other government agencies to find out the names and ages of the people living at your address? An interdepartmental privacy and confidentiality team at the U.S. Census Bureau is considering questions like this one and engaging in ongoing monitoring of public perception of the use of administrative records in surveys and censuses. Since Fall 2012, the Census Bureau has fielded survey items in an ongoing nightly national telephone survey asking about the use of government records for the upcoming decennial census. In this presentation, we summarize our findings from a series of items fielded in the summer of 2016 asking about privacy and confidentiality concerns related to the Census Bureau's use of administrative records and discuss the practical and ethical considerations that arise when considering the use of administrative records in survey research.