Word: rubins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Members of the Statistics Department, who have been working on this project for more than a year, propose selecting population segments of 300,000 homes in various regions across the country and then intensively studying their group dynamics after a normal U.S. census is taken by mail, said Rubin, who has been at Harvard for four years. The scientists, who include Rubin, Assistant Professor of Statistics Hal Stern and four graduate students, then use the results from these segmented studies to adjust the census' total population count...
...more exact count. Then we would compare the two counts and arrive at a different adjustment factor for each population block--such as Black males or white, elderly women. By applying those numbers to national statistics, we would adjust for the names missed in the national mailing," says Rubin, who has worked with the Census Bureau on statistical problems several times over the last 10 years...
Currently, the U.S. holds a census every 10 years in which most of the people-counting is done by mail, according to Tom Belian, a graduate student working with Rubin on the project. Every American household receives a census form, which reports the number of people living at their home. "It's a huge undertaking, costing over $1 billion," Belian said. The Census Bureau has never before adjusted its population data...
Unfortunately, Rubin admits, solving the undercount problem involves more than just locating lazy census respondents. He says that the Department of Commerce realizes it misses those people who intentionally misrepresent the number of people in their households on their reports, as well as those who do not mail in any census forms...
...times people who live in overcrowded apartments, where there are limits on the number of residents, will say there are fewer people in their households because they think somehow Uncle Sam will notify their landlords and get them thrown out," Rubin says. "Sometimes women will also omit their husbabnds' names from the census because they think they will get more welfare money to take care of their children...