My Census adventure

2010 is a census year, and I hope you have already returned your census form. If you do not return it, in the next few months a census enumerator will visit you. In the 1990 census I worked as an enumerator. I had a sabbatical leave that year, and as an economist I have often used numbers that the government collects, and I wondered what the process of collecting those numbers was like. Since I had free time, I decided to find out.

In the last month as I have been trying to sort through old paper and discard things I no longer need, I found the notes I kept from that experience. I do not remember why I kept notes, but it may have been that I regretted not keeping them for some earlier adventures I had. Always looking for something to put on this blog, I decided I would edit my notes and give you a peek at that old Rensselaer adventure.

First Day
It was wait, wait, wait. At 8:30 only three people were there, but more trickled in until 9:00. We filled in forms and took our oath of office. Then we found out how to fill out the pay forms. There was discussion of the vagaries of getting paid.

Second Day??
I was not impressed with the organization of the training. Not all the workbooks were there and there was no overhead projector. One of the trainers had never worked in the field--it was the blind leading the blind. The procedures are a giant flow chart, a giant decision tree. There is a range of abilities among the applicants--some are obviously sharper than others. But does it matter? Perhaps a nice smile is the best qualification.

Third Day
By the third day of training the lack of organization is no longer amusing but irritating. Nothing starts on time, discussion drags. The crew leaders do not move through the material well. Training begins at 9:00 and we skip lunch so we get out by 1:00.

In the field
How are they watching us? I get a call back from a gentleman who is upset because he returned his questionnaire. Is the Commerce Department really so unorganized that it loses these forms? Or are these cases a key way to monitor enumerators? If I were doing the monitoring, I would do it that way. To monitor effectively you cannot tell people how you are doing it.

One of the satisfactions that people can get from being an enumerator is that they are part of something much bigger than themselves. The Census is nationwide and it has been going on for two centuries and will continue for the foreseeable future.

Another day
Today I had some frustrations.
a) The maps are sometimes terribly wrong, and when they are, they eat up time. Trying to unscramble the mistakes of others can be confusing and time consuming. Many of the updates on my maps are wrong.

I have had one case of an address listed in the wrong block. If it were a non-response, I could change it with a delete and an add. But it has already responded, so I do not know what to do.

Another case of mistake gives me a number of additional units. The actual situation looks like 205 # A and # B, 205 1/2, 207 #A and #B, 207 1/2, etc., where the buildings with the 1/2 are separate. The listings assume that 207B is 207 1/2. What a mess!

I encountered my first hostility. A house had new residents who knew nothing of the former residents. They gave me the name of the building owner, who I contacted. He thought I should get this info from the police or utility. Unfortunately I forgot to ask the important question first--was this unit vacant on April 1--and I had to call back. He must have been busy because he told me that the problem with this country was all this prying. I suspect he did not realize that he was dealing with one of his neighbors. I hope I do not have to deal with him again.

Which makes me wonder, who are the easiest people to enumerate--the rich or the poor? My guess is the poor overall, except for the neurotic and psychotic.  My hunch is that the rich are probably pretty obnoxious, but perhaps more send in their forms. Also, the rich value their time more. The poor are more likely to sit down and chat.

The poor are probably better at following orders. I would love to compare notes with census takers in wealthy subdivisions.

****
Had a case of one woman who was not sure when she moved in. Perhaps she was being evasive.
**
Does everyone know everyone in a small town? No! On the contrary, an amazing number do not even know the names of their neighbors. There are a lot of little islands--people who exist in isolation from their neighbors. They do not bother their neighbors and their neighbors do not bother them.

Reflections after the first week in the field
Census taking is detective work or research work. It requires one to track down leads in an organized way and to know where you can go for information.

Some of the information that is not of much interest to people is of interest to the Census. So far not one person I have talked to could tell me how many rooms their house had without counting them. So people do not consider that an important statistic. But the Census does.

When I meet someone in the "about 40" group, I am always interested. We sure have grown old, and we have children who are grown up and having babies. The bloom of youth is gone. And to think that it seemed so short ago that we thought people in their 40s were ancient.

There are a tremendous number of hybrid families and a lot of divorced and separated people. There are also a tremendous number of rental properties, but my sample may be biased.
[Note from the present: Until I worked the Census, I had no idea how many of the big, older homes in Rensselaer had been subdivided into apartments.]

Monday
I had a woman who did not want to tell me her marital status. It struck me that if you do not want to be noticed, you simply give the info. The person taking it will quickly forget the ordinary. If you refuse, you put an explanation point on yourself--you draw attention to yourself and what you want to hide becomes obvious.

May 10
The other night I did a traditional, normal family--mother, father, three kids in a single-family home, all with the same last name, obviously middle class. It was weird because I have seen so little of what is considered the normal, average family.

I have seen mostly apartments, lots of single persons--young never-marrieds or divorced. I have seen three father-headed families and of course a bunch of female-headed families. I have seen extended families and hybrid families--yours, mine, and ours.

The cases that may stick the longest are the unpleasant cases--Larry S' rudeness, or D M's bitchiness, or B. H's refusal. I have gotten very suspicious now of people who want me to return later. Three times when I have gone back, no one was there. I guess I am really naive--but I did not recognize this as a strategy for getting rid of unwanted visitors until I had been victimized. Now I suspect all such postponements. [Note from my present self: I have no memory of the bitchiness that I thought I would remember, and I do not know which refusal I was referring to here.]

Finishing up the last few cases is a real pain. They are for some reason or another the cases that are hardest to get info on. I suppose everyone has the same.

An enumerator prays for friendly landlords. When the tenants are surly, we depend on the landlords. If they are surly too, it makes life really hard.

Accuracy problems [Comment from the present: I overemphasize accuracy problems because  they were what I was interested in going into the job.]

I had one case where I was ready to turn in a form of last resort based on the info the landlord had given me. He said there was one occupant. On my last visit, I found her--she said two occupants.

How many minutes does it take to get to work? I had two strange responses. One said an hour because he cruises around town before he goes to work. The other said up to two hours because the guy he rides with likes to stop and talk. How do the statisticians deal with that?

If a building has an apartment that is not in the address register, and all the buildings around respond, it is unlikely that the enumerator will find them. I have found my adds only when I have been looking for non respondents.

There are incentive problems--perhaps unavoidable. Because we seem to be monitored by cases per hour, there is a tendency to hand in some cases that perhaps should be held. I handed in one based on landlord info, and then later found the people at a different address. It was too late to do anything.

Because all the names in one register must be done before moving on, one wants to finish up those last few cases fast. One does not want ugly surprises at the end--like finding additional housing units that are not in the register. Sometimes a little patience will solve problems, but one cannot have patience with the last name. [Note from my present self--I am not sure what I was talking about here.]

The census keeps answers confidential. I hope they do not keep non-cooperation confidential. I hope that the law allows them to release to other government agencies, and any private organization that wants it, a list of all addresses and persons who refused to cooperate. It would serve the bastards right.

****
I have hit so much mail misdelivery or Census Bureau mess-up out in the country that it is discouraging. I believe the people when they say that they turned it in, and they often are a bit hostile about it. I have not found a way to handle it yet. I wonder how much is Census and how much is Post Office.

I am beginning to understand better why I am not well-suited for this line of work even though my productivity statistics are extremely good. I am still not able to shrug off the hostility and rudeness of some of the respondents. I tend to take it personally, even though it is not meant that way. As someone I trust told me, most of that hostility, rudeness, evasiveness, etc. reflect the problems the people have. But even though my brain tells me that, I am still affected--my reasoning cannot control the emotional reaction.

[Comment from the present: if you turn in your census forms, you are unlikely to ever encounter an enumerator. If you do meet one, please be polite. He or she may be a neighbor that you just have not met yet.]

Sunday
Today I talked to another enumerator, one who had come in late. She has a big chunk of Newton County and 126 non-responses. There is no way she will be done by May 30 because she can't get ten cases done a day. If I were organizing, I would have given out all the tough areas initially and saved the easy cases for the end, but that is not the way my crew leader did it. It ought to make for an interesting close.

I found a recreational home in McCoysburg. The owner lives in Chicago and uses it as a weekend getaway. There is no accounting for taste.

I have found a lot of mail misdeliveries, a lot of places where the Census did not have correct addresses. I hate to have to redo people who said that they had already filled out a form. Perhaps as a result, the people I have been dealing with in the country seem more normal than the townspeople I met, where they were mostly renters in apartments. I think about one half of the townspeople I contacted had no phone. If it was not one half, it was close.

However, I have met some strange types. One guy I met seemed to feel that he just had to refuse to answer a few questions just to demonstrate that he felt that the government was prying too much. I do not think it mattered which questions he did not answer--just that he make his statement.

And there have been several others who have indicated that they did not like answering questions. One refused some over the phone. Another answered but editorialized a lot--a pig-headed pig farmer.

I have enumerated a mentally-retarded man who had not the faintest idea of what his home was worth. ("It must be at least $500.") A couple of places looked a bit spooky. Out of one dilapidated old house emerged a hunched-over, gnarled old man who tried to make his dog retreat. He was not completely coherent. The strangest place so far looked like it was from the set of a horror film. A pack of a half dozen dogs surrounded the car as I drove up the drive to the top of a small hill, where there was an ancient, two-story frame house in advanced disrepair. There was trash-- broken equipment--everywhere. The house had had foam insulation injected, and it had oozed out in places, so the house looked like it had orange growths on it.

Right before I was ready to leave, a bearded buy came up to find out what I wanted. He told me he was up to his neck in work and I should come back another day.

A puzzle for me as an economist has been three houses that are vacant and the owner has no intention of renting. In one case I could see it was because the house was run down. Still, there are large opportunity costs. If they do not want to be landlords, they could still sell the dwelling and use the proceeds to buy more land. I do not understand what they are doing.

****

The last phase of work was field follow up, which began two or three weeks after the non-response follow up was finished. There were two primary items in this were a double check on the vacancy/delete units and to try to complete "failed edits." Failed edits were questionnaires that had unanswered questions or any other problem that "headquarters" had not been able to resolve on the phone.

I got a new leader as my old leader was "demoted" to enumerator. (This phase was smaller and did not need as many people or leaders.) The whole thing lasted only a week, and I put a bit more than 40 hours. I had three ARAs and only one of which had any country. [My present-day self did not remember what an ARA was. It is an Address Register Area. By this time I must have been becoming quite the little bureaucrat, able to sling around the acronyms.]

The failed edits were in some cases missing only minor information--I do not know why they sent them back. I had several people who were hostile or who let me know that they did not care to see me, but only one refusal. I was able to track down the needed info in the court house--I was rather proud of my detective skills. (The house was held in life trust for one of the occupants, which says a lot about mental capacity.)

Vacant/deletes mostly went very fast. The only place I found much was in the trailer park, where two vacants should not have been, and one person had not been counted at a previous address. I also found some adds--four altogether. The total number of units I ended up adding was impressive, or discouraging because most were found by chance, and I suspect that a fair number in Jasper County were never found.

A story from the office: apparently to meet a deadline so as to look good, the office people did not process about one hundred of the last forms they got from non-response, but entered them as vacant knowing that they would be rechecked. If true, I am appalled. We were told never to falsify data, yet the office apparently did. (Also, if they relied on vacant/delete review to get them back, there is a very good chance that some of them did not get put back. I suspect that only obvious problems were corrected with this.)

One of my frustrations was the inability to correct mistakes in the listings on the completed entries. Often they would list a name on the completed entry, especially when it was a multiunit building. I found one case where people had been put into the wrong places, and never did get it straightened out. I added a unit for the people who were mis-listed, but who were living in a house under construction, explained exactly what the problem was, and the form came back with a note to fix it, but no information about how I was to fix it. Here my crew leader was deficient. She should have pulled the form and made sure her supervisor got it corrected. That was what the other crew leader did with all her problem cases, and she got them done.

The Thursday before Memorial Day I went out and found that I really did not want to be there. I think I had done too much too fast, and perhaps my imagination ran away with me. I was in unknown territory, and could imagine someone taking a shot at me at the end of one of those long lanes.

I was pretty well done with my third book, but got a chance to have another person, Betty, finish it. I figured Memorial Day was prime time--it should not be missed. So after a lot of work to get her badge back from the old crew leader, Betty set forth. She spend seven hours on her first day and did not finish a single case. I suspect she just got lost out there.

Betty did finish up most of the cases in the next few days, but she would have turned in two houses as vacant that I knew were occupied if I had not been watching her. She did turn in one as vacant on the basis of personal observation, something I would never have done.

******

Back to the present. As I have typed this in, I realize how little of it I still remember. Most of it had long ago evaporated from my memory pools. And if you do not understand certain parts of it, do not ask me because I no longer understand some of the details. 

Although I did not remember some of the things in my notes, I do remember some things that were not in my notes. I remember that someone told me that when I was working on South Front Street, one person living there called the police to report me as a suspicious individual. (Nothing happened.) I remember being very impressed with how the Census measured the productivity of people in the field, but I no longer remember the details of what they were doing. I recall someone on Park who was in his apartment, but would not come to the door. Some old guy in the country thought he had a right to refuse to answer the census. (The Census is mandated in the Constitution of the United States--no one has a right not to answer.) I remember discovering someone living in one of the commercial buildings on North McKinley and a family living in a church that was being converted to housing on Moody Road. I found quite a number of people in places that were not on the maps, and I wish I had written a bit more about that. I remember following a rule to the letter and paying a third visit to a person that was not needed--sometimes you have to use common sense rather than blindly follow procedures. The long form asked people how much income they earned and what the value of their house was, and many people were a bit unsure of the former and many people were clueless about the later.