Comparisons of administrative record rosters to census self-responses and NRFU household member responses1

Abstract

One of the U.S. Census Bureau’s innovations in the 2020 U.S. Census was the use of administrative records (AR) to create household rosters for enumerating some addresses when a response was not available but high-quality ARs were. The goal was to reduce the cost of the fieldwork in the Nonresponse Follow-up (NRFU). The original plan had NRFU beginning in mid-May and continuing through late July. However, the pandemic forced the delay of NRFU and caused the Internal Revenue Service to postpone the income tax filing deadline, resulting in an interruption in the delivery of ARs to the U.S. Census Bureau. The delays were not anticipated when U.S. Census Bureau staff conducted the research on AR enumeration with the 2010 Census data in preparation for the 2020 Census or during the fine tuning of plans for using ARs during the 2018 Census Test. These circumstances raised questions about whether the quality of the AR household rosters was high enough for use in enumeration. To aid in investigating the concern about the quality of the AR rosters, this study compares census rosters to AR rosters that meet a quality standard at addresses that have both and the census roster is either a self-response or a NRFU household member response. A key result is that the mode of census response and the amount of time between the response and the April 1st reference date impacts the agreement rate between AR roster size and the census roster size at addresses that have both types of rosters.