US Census 2010 will not track disability
An article by June Kronholz in The Wall Street Journal announces that the official United States Census, performed every decade, will include only six questions in 2010. None of these will address health or disability status.
An excerpt:
The old long-form census questionnaire, with its queries about house size, commutes to work and other details about daily life is out -- spun off in 2000 to the new American Community Survey, which questions 3 million households a year. For the 2010 census, every member of the country's 120 million households will get a one-page form asking for information that Congress has said it wants to know. (The final form of the questions is subject to congressional review.)The six remaining questions? Name, relationship to "head of household," gender (two choices) and age. Questions 5 and 6 are required by Congress. Six is a general question about race, and five tries to nail down who is Hispanic and exactly where they're from.
Here's a fun fact:
Under a 2005 order from Congress, question No. 6 also allows people to call themselves "some other race" and identify that race on a fill-in line. In census tests, respondents declared themselves Creole, Aryan, rainbow and cosmopolitan, among others.Absent along with any disability-related questions: income level, employment status, health care coverage, education, marital status, housing speciifcs, languages used....
10 comments:
Hmmm. What do you think about this?
I do think tracking healthcare coverage and health issues is important. I can't help thinking this is a way of hiding from the fact that healthcare and provisions for people with disabilities is pretty poor in the US.
--IP
just wondering if the govermential beaurocrats trying to bury their heads in the sand and trying to not to truly acknowledge the seriousness of the larger problem of health care /disability/child welfare/ect. couldn't the census help be a guide to help dictate trends good or bad an help us change it?
The government claims that this annual "American Community Survey" takes the place of the long Census, but it's a statistical sample rather than a full census. And I find it disturbing that the official Census will continue to be done, but without the burden of gathering much useful information. So we'll know an approximate total count of citizens and non-citizens, their ages, genders, and race. What useis that info if we have no sense at all of how people in the United States are doing, living, working, traveling to work, getting their health care needs met or not. Perhaps this annual survey does provide comparable info, but will there be any required consistency of questions asked? Will the funding be cut and it suddenly disappears? The census is supposed to a constant, reliable comparison of info and it will no longer exist.
I'm not sure what side of this question I take. A well-designed survey is just as accurate as a census; and because it costs so much less than a census, it can be done annually, which allows for much more sensitive tracking of how things are changing over time.
The main thing I'll mourn is the loss of detailed neighborhood-level data.
The ACS questionnaire contains three questions (pdf link) relating to disability.
Why is it more important to know the racial breakdown of the citizenry than to know its immediate and longterm economic needs?
This fish is rotten and it stinks. I wonder if it's too late to change this. I wonder if a letter-writing campaign is in order.
Incidentally, I have never in my 44 years received a copy of the ACS to fill out, ever. As you noted, unlike with the census, a household has to be selected to participate. I wonder how those selections are determined.
It *does* feel like a way to "bury" the uninsured, those with impairments...
I want to know specifically:
Why we were removed.
Who thought it was a brilliant idea to do so...
Who else signed off on this change.
My understanding is that the US Census is needed to determine the representation each state gets in Congress. The race questions are mandated by law, which is not a bad thing. The change seems to jettison anything not required by law or Constitution, with the ACS supposedly taking on what the Census gives up.
It's not clear to me exactly what details will be lost by switching from a full census to statistical sampling. I do imagine that rural areas and the concerns of disabled rural citizens, for example, will become harder to track.
With some 40 million Americans on disability that excludes about a third of our households.
Perhaps we should start a campaign to write in disability on the census - put it in one of the optional race boxes...
let's keep in mind that the census was designated to count voters for the creation of congressional districts. I'm sure there are plenty of resources for doing the rest of what these comments are concerned about.
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