I was asked to come back with an update on if skipping some questions in the census would trigger a census worker visit or not. The questions skipped were: Name, Phone number and birth date.
Well, it is now July 5th and I can report there has NOT been any visit by a census worker.
I did actually talk to a census worker while walking the dog. She asked me if a house down the street was vacant or not. She also noted the house I came out of and stated that there was no visit scheduled for my place.
So the conclusion is that yes, there are some questions on the census you can skip without triggering a census worker visit.
We got the long form. Filled it out, but didn’t mail it in. Got a visit, during which she said mailing wouldn’t work anymore, she would have to fill things out. She said she’d call back to schedule an appointment (we were on our way out and couldn’t make one at the moment), left a couple messages a while back, and we haven’t heard anything since.
They likely won’t be back at this point. Depending on how far behind your Regional Census Center, the NRFU operation should be just about wrapped up by now. My RCC is working on Vacant-Deletes starting next week. I think Washington wanted the NRFU to be complete by July 1st, give or take.
You didn’t get the long form. There is no long form. You may have gotten the American Community Survey, which is ongoing and not a “long form census” - it has replaced the long form. They will bother you on that one.
Well…no reason really. But on the other hand, they feel they’re gonna get more accurate and complete information by doing the door to door interviews. If you tell the enumerators to tell the respondents they can still mail them in and they go to the door, a lot of people are gonna say “Oh I don’t wanna do this right now. I’ll just mail it in later.” And they won’t.
The difference is that the long census form came out the same time as the short census form and was due the same time as the short census form. It just went to fewer people. The American Community Survey is sent to some portion of the population every month – about 250,000 addresses every month. So you could get an ACS form any month in any year, regardless of whether it’s a census year or not.
Because the American Community Survey is not part of the Decennial Census. It’s an entirely separate survey run by a completely different part of the Census Bureau. To call it “long form” to differentiate it from the “short form” would be inaccurate.
Because the information has to be gathered one way or the other. Some people are noodle-brains who forgot to mail their forms in, so a human being had to chase them down. Others had what they considered good reasons not to send their form back. For example, some people were concerned that their forms would be stolen from the mail; they wanted to wait until a human being with Census credentials showed up. Others didn’t return it because they didn’t understand the form and didn’t know where to go for help. Still others don’t speak English or Spanish and had to wait for an enumerator who speaks the language. There are also people who literally couldn’t fill it out because of impaired sight or dementia. (No joke. I’ve spent a LOT of time sorting out questionnaires filled out by nursing home administrators on behalf of residents of their Alzheimer’s-care facilities.)
In any event, the Census isn’t much different from any other massive project. There are many stages to it, and each stage has a deadline before the project can progress to the next one. Since the final report has to be on the President’s desk by December 31 of this year, and since the statisticians and analysts still have to do their thing, trusting that all households will mail their forms back in time is a little optimistic, don’t you think?
FTR, not every Census worker has been laid off. I still have a job to go to tomorrow.
Depends on where you are. I had two seperate visits for not filling in all the information. The one lady would not leave promptly when I told her to just go away. The other one woke me up (I work night shift) and I just said you don’t need that information and she left promptly. However the second lady was also accompainied by a younger man. The visits were about two or three weeks apart.
