Census Of Population

Curtis discusses census making as a political project, investigating its place in and impact on party politics and ethnic, religious, and sectional struggles.

The population and housing census is part of an integrated national statistical system, which may include other censuses (for example, agriculture), surveys, registers and administrative files. It provides, at regular intervals, the benchmark for population count at national and local levels. For small geographical areas or sub-populations, it may represent the only source of information for certain social, demographic and economic characteristics. For many countries the census also provides a solid framework to develop sampling frames. This publication represents one of the pillars for data collection on the number and characteristics of the population of a country.

Since its early years, the United Nations has issued a series of international recommendations on population and housing censuses under the title “Principles and Recommendations for Population and Housing Censuses”. These publication series, which are based on good national practices in census taking, are widely used by national statistical offices and census officials in countries throughout the world in planning and carrying out population and housing censuses, as well as other related data collection activities, particularly demographic and and socio-economic surveys. The recommendations provide guidance on the main characteristics of population and housing censuses, general material on census methodology, planning, and operations, and more detailed guidance on the content of censuses, in terms of topics for population and also housing. These series are currently revised to assist countries in preparing for the 2020 round of censuses by taking into account changes in methodology, technology, as well as the need for better data dissemination and utilization.

This fascinating three-thousand-year history of the census traces the making of the modern survey and explores its political power in the age of big data and surveillance. In April 2020, the United States will embark on what has been called "the largest peacetime mobilization in American history": the decennial population census. It is part of a tradition of counting people that goes back at least three millennia and now spans the globe. In The Sum of the People, data scientist Andrew Whitby traces the remarkable history of the census, from ancient China and the Roman Empire, through revolutionary America and Nazi-occupied Europe, to the steps of the Supreme Court. Marvels of democracy, instruments of exclusion, and, at worst, tools of tyranny and genocide, censuses have always profoundly shaped the societies we've built. Today, as we struggle to resist the creep of mass surveillance, the traditional census -- direct and transparent -- may offer the seeds of an alternative.

This open access book describes the differences in US census coverage, also referred to as “differential undercount”, by showing which groups have the highest net undercounts and which groups have the greatest undercount differentials, and discusses why such undercounts occur. In addition to focusing on measuring census coverage for several demographic characteristics, including age, gender, race, Hispanic origin status, and tenure, it also considers several of the main hard-to-count populations, such as immigrants, the homeless, the LBGT community, children in foster care, and the disabled. However, given the dearth of accurate undercount data for these groups, they are covered less comprehensively than those demographic groups for which there is reliable undercount data from the Census Bureau. This book is of interest to demographers, statisticians, survey methodologists, and all those interested in census coverage.