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Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census (2006)

Chapter: 4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations

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Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
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–4–
Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations

IN THIS CHAPTER we look beyond the residential ambiguities inherent in the group quarters or nonhousehold population to examine other living situations and social trends that complicate the specification of residence. We consider five main categories:

  • people with ties to multiple nonpermanent residences, including those who are highly mobile (Section 4–A);

  • groups for whom residential ambiguity is created by complex household structures and the changing nature of “family” in American life (4–B);

  • homeless people with ties to no fixed residence, living on the streets or making use of shelters and other services (4–C);

  • people who may be missed by existing census operations and questions, whether due to gaps in residence rules and questions or to structural features in the census questionnaire (4–D); and

  • people whose true residential location—and even their counting in the census—may be affected by the nature of the housing stock in which they live (4–E).

4–A
MULTIPLE RESIDENCE AND HIGHLY MOBILE POPULATIONS

This section describes some living situations in which a person’s residence lacks a degree of permanence: people in these situations tend to move between

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

more than one residential location, with varying frequency. Gober and Mings (1984:165) argue that “nonpermanent changes in residence have received little attention by social scientists in the western-industrialized world because the process of nonpermanent movement falls between the crack, so to speak, of what we usually define as migration and tourism.” For many reasons, even the rough size of the populations in these living situation groups is difficult to ascertain, much less definitive information on trends in their growth as a share of the total population.

Alone among modern U.S. censuses, the 1980 census included in its supplementary reports a separate tabulation of nonpermanent residents, tallying “elderly seasonal migrants, owners of second homes, itinerant farm workers and business people who reside part-time in out-of-town accommodations” (Gober and Mings, 1984:164). These estimates “were never intended as estimates of seasonal or any other form of temporary migration” (McHugh et al., 1995:253), and they excluded nonpermanent residential situations such as those “staying temporarily at the home of a permanent resident or in hotels, motels, campgrounds or other tourist-like settings” (Gober and Mings, 1984:164). Despite their limitations, the 1980 estimates were something rare in the study of multiple-residence situations—national-level information, rather than case-study analysis.

Both Smith (1989) and McHugh et al. (1995) suggest broader conceptual frameworks for understanding multiple residence. These frameworks suggest that the assumption that people are linked to a single usual fixed place of residence may be unrealistic.

4–A.1
“Snowbirds” and “Sunbirds”

“Anyone who has spent spring vacation in Daytona Beach, August at the New Jersey seashore, or February in Sun City, Arizona, knows that many places have large numbers of temporary residents who live there for a few days, weeks, or even months.” These temporary residents, Smith (1989:430) notes, “often have a tremendous impact on an area’s economic, social, and physical environment, as they increase the demand for housing, shopping centers, health care, water, electricity, transportation, recreational facilities, police protection, and many other types of goods and services.” Lowry (1987:15) comments that some of the “seasonal inflow of residents” in such areas are “casual visitors who will not return; but others return year after year, either to rented quarters or to seasonal homes that they own.” This latter group is particularly interesting because, by virtue of the frequency with which they return to the area, they develop strong ties and “often become substantially involved in local affairs through their status as property owners.” However, “they are not usually able to vote in local elections because they have registered elsewhere.”

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

The term “snowbird” has gained popular usage to describe people—often retirees or the elderly—who leave cold-weather areas during the winter months for warmer climes, such as Florida, Arizona, southern California, and the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Hogan and Steinnes (1996) and Smith and House (2005) adopt the term “sunbird” to describe those who follow the counterpart trend, fleeing hot summer areas for milder northern climes in places like Cape Cod, the Maine shore, and northern Wisconsin. As discussed in Box 2-1, the existence of such seasonal migration has been known for decades, and tradeoffs in its perceived impact were considered in adjusting the date of the census in the early 1900s. However, the census has not historically asked the questions to make an informed assessment of the size and growth of the snowbird and sunbird communities.1

Instead, the research that has been done to date on the demographics of the snowbird population has tended to be local area studies done in areas with high concentrations of seasonal residents:

  • Smith and House (2005:4) and colleagues surveyed 500 Florida households each month between September 2000 and December 2003 by telephone. Of the 7,041 respondents aged 55 and older, 83 percent were permanent, full-time Florida residents; 12 percent were permanent Florida residents who indicated that they spend more than 30 consecutive days at some other location (sunbirds), and 5 percent were not permanent Florida residents but were currently in the state on an extended stay (snowbirds). See also Smith and House (2004a,b) and Galvez (1997) for further comment on the Florida snowbird population.

  • Research on the Arizona snowbird population has taken several shapes. Happel and Hogan (2002) and colleagues conducted a statewide household survey during 1990–1991, intended to reach 400–500 households a month. That survey showed a variation in the percentage of nonpermanent households, ranging from 0.7 percent in September to 6 percent in February and March (peak season). Though the survey offered other insights, it was terminated in 1991 due to funding cutbacks. However, Arizona State University sponsored smaller-scale, targeted interviewing at mobile home and recreational vehicle parks, beginning in 1984 and continuing through 2000.

    Happel and Hogan (2002) estimated that Arizona may have 273,000 long-term seasonal residents who come each year at the peak of the season. Similarly, Smith and House (2004a) estimate that there may be as many as 920,000 seasonal residents arriving each year in Florida, not counting short-stay tourists.

1

The 1980 special tabulation on nonpermanent residents covered only those snowbirds whose destination was Arizona or Florida (Hogan and Steinnes, 1996).

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×
  • Researchers from the University of Texas–Pan American (UTPA) estimate that 127,000 “winter Texans” took up residence in the Rio Grande Valley (63,500 households), spending a total of $420 million while there; the average length of stay was 3.7 months, and most had made the same seasonal move for 10 years or more (Valley Markets and Tourism Research Center, 2005). The UTPA study also collected survey information from full-time valley residents, as well as Mexican nationals who cross the border for very short (often one day or less) visits, principally to shop. UTPA researchers have conducted a study of “winter Texans” biennially since 1986 (see also Center for Tourism Research, 2003).

Snowbirds were also the focus of an ethnographic study conducted as part of the 2000 census experimental program; Hunter et al. (2003) and de la Puente (2004) summarize the results of the study, performed by Mings (2001).

Though the current levels of snowbird and sunbird migration are not well determined, researchers suggest that seasonal migration will almost certainly continue to increase due to several factors, among them the aging of the “baby boomer” generation, longer life expectancies, and rising household wealth.

The local area surveys that have been done on the snowbird populations focus principally on the nature and impact of snowbirds on their destination communities, where they go to for their seasonal trips. Much less is known about the origin locations of the snowbird population—the small-area impacts of depopulation in northern, cold-weather communities and consequent lessening of the need for some services (Happel and Hogan, 2002). In much the same manner as in localities housing college students or prisoners, the location at which seasonal residents are counted in the census is important to both communities—arguably more so, since large seasonal swings in population can create large drains on local resources like transportation and health care. The limited work that does exist on snowbirds’ origin destinations suggests that some common assumptions may be erroneous. For instance, “it is popular wisdom that the usual residence for nonpermanent households is ‘far away,”’ noted Mann (1987:11): “for example, 61 percent of all New York State households initially enumerated in a place other than their usual residence were found in Florida, hardly a surprise.” However, there are limits to which snowbird movement can be thought of as a cross-state phenomenon; Mann cites a Census Bureau report on nonpermanent households as reporting that “47 percent of California’s nonpermanent households lived permanently elsewhere in California; 44 percent of New York State’s nonpermanent households lived in New York and 33 percent of Texas’ lived in Texas.” Relatively little research has been done to date on either the origin or destination of sunbirds; see Hogan and Steinnes (1996) for a contrast between snowbirds “flying from” Minnesota and sunbirds originating in Arizona.

The residence rules for the 1990 census (see Box 5-4) would treat a snow-

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

bird or sunbird as “a person who has more than one home and divides time between them,” in which case the rules directed that they be counted at “the household where he/she spends the greater part of the calendar year.” The problem of counting seasonal residents was singled out for commentary in the Rolark (1995:3) memorandum outlining the 2000 census residence rules:

[The 1990 rule for “snowbirds”] was never clearly explained on the census questionnaire and we never told respondents which calendar year (i.e., the census calendar year, January 1, 1990 to December 31, 1990; the calendar year preceding the census, January 1, 1989 to December 31, 1989; or the year from April 1, 1990 to April 1, 1991) [to use as a reference]. Using any of these reference periods presents a unique set of problems ranging from the accuracy of the respondent’s memory to the respondent’s inability to project future behavior. We recommend that persons who live in one residence during the winter months and live in another residence during the remainder of the year be counted at the place where ‘they spend most of their time’ during the ‘yearly cycle’[—]the nonwinter residence. This gets back to the general rule for persons with multiple residences.

Accordingly, snowbirds are referenced in rule 2 of the 2000 census residence rules as being counted “where they spend most of the time during the week, month, or year, etc.” and are cited as an example of a “yearly cycle” in the attachment to the rules.

Conceptually, the accurate counting of the seasonal snowbird and sunbird populations is complicated by several factors, including the timing of census operations and the cross-national scope of seasonal migration. First, with respect to timing, the 1920 decision on the timing of Census Day (see Box 2-1) alludes to a basic tradeoff that must be weighed: the early months of the year—including the peak census activity months of March and April—are times when the census may find snowbirds at their winter (and likely shorter-term) address. At their nonseasonal addresses, some information on their characteristics may be gleaned from proxy interviews with neighbors or landlords, but the census questionnaire provides no mechanism to suggest a connection between the two addresses. The issue of timing is complicated further when follow-up interviews and coverage measurement operations extend into May, June, and July. Snowbirds may return to their nonseasonal homes, but the later interviews may miss sunbirds who depart at the beginning of the summer season.

Second, snowbird and sunbird migration is not only within the United States. Coates et al. (2002) observe an increasing tendency for Canadians to move to warm-weather locations in the United States for the winter months. “Detailed statistics on the scale of the seasonal migration are sketchy at best” and support widely varying estimates, but they conclude (based on 1999 data)

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

that on the order of 300,000–375,000 Canadians join the snowbird migration. Foreign nationals receiving a census questionnaire at their seasonal home might be less inclined to return it, but that question does not appear to have been studied empirically. In addition, Coates et al. (2002) suggest an increased tendency for snowbirds (both U.S.- and Canada-based) to spend winter months in Mexico, making it impossible to contact them directly at the seasonal residence.

Both Happel and Hogan (2002) and Smith and House (2004a) argue for the need for the Census Bureau to be able to generate national estimates of the seasonal migrant population. Though improvements could be made to the decennial census to acquire such estimates, both sets of authors suggest that the American Community Survey (ACS, the replacement for the census long-form sample) is an ideal vehicle for generating these estimates on a regular basis. In particular, Smith and House (2004a) advocate asking specific questions on the ACS in order to differentiate short- and long-term visitors to an area: “Is the current address your usual place of residence?” If not, “Where is your usual place of residence?” And, “How many months will you be at the current address during your current visit?”

In this section, we have focused on one component of seasonal migration, specifically the movement of older, retired people for stays of several months. It is worth nothing that other significant short-term population movements affect younger age groups and even shorter “seasons.” One such case are groups of migrant farm workers, which we discuss in Section 4–A.6; another seasonal population of interest in major hosting cities like Las Vegas, Chicago, and Atlanta is the steady stream of short-term attendees of professional meetings and conferences. Still another major, regular such shift is the influx of college students on spring break that arrives at beach communities, such as South Padre Island, Texas, and Panama City, Florida, or other destinations. Because colleges vary in the exact date of their spring break or semester/quarter break, these communities may experience major population surges—and both the economic benefits and resource drains that accompany that growth—for much of March through April. Studies of the size and nature of the spring break population is limited, but the short-term effect on small areas can be large. Vincent et al. (2000) estimated that 186,000 college students came to the South Padre Island area alone in March 2000, spending on the order of $156 million and resulting in the creation of 4,276 jobs during the spring break season.

4–A.2
Modern Nomads: Recreational Vehicle Users

The “life course” framework for multiple residence suggested by McHugh et al. (1995) identifies snowbird and sunbird movement as a cyclical migration pattern prevalent among retirees and the elderly. Another pattern evident in

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

the same age group—albeit less tied to specific seasons—are those people who essentially travel year-round in recreational vehicles (RVs), touring various parts of the country and visiting family members and friends. Part of this population is also known as “Good Sams,” after the Good Sam Club formed so that members could have a signal to know of other motorists and facilities where they could get assistance on the road. In the extreme case of year-round RV users, these people might be considered “homeless snowbirds”—constantly on the move with the seasons (Happel and Hogan, 2002).

Sponsored by the Recreational Vehicle Industry Association, the University of Michigan Survey Research Center has conducted national surveys of RV users every 4 years, as part of its Surveys of Consumers program. The 2001 National Survey of Recreation Vehicle Owners was based on a representative sample of households contacted between January and June 2001. The survey estimated that 6.9 million U.S. households own a RV,2 representing 7.6 percent of all vehicle-owning households, consistent with rates around 7 percent from previous versions of the survey and suggesting mild growth from a recent low of 6.8 percent in the 1993 data (Curtin, 2001). Owners of full-size motorhomes (1.9 percent of all households) tend to be older (average age of 59) than those with less fully equipped RV types like folding camping trailers (average age of 41). Only 18 percent of motorhome owners reported having dependent children, compared with 61 percent of folding camping trailer owners.

For the 2000 census, a new residence rule 16 was meant to clarify the way in which the RV population should be counted rather than change it. The rule allowed this group to claim a usual home elsewhere; if the respondent could not specify a place where they live most of the time, they were to be counted at the camp where they were found. The rule further noted that if a respondent considers the RV to be his or her usual place of residence, then the RV is considered a housing unit and would be tabulated with the household (not group quarters) population.

Hunter et al. (2003) and de la Puente (2004) summarize ethnographic research by Mings (2001) that focused on a set of RV campgrounds in Arizona. This work suggests some of the conceptual difficulties involved in counting RV users:

  • Definition of the physical place where they are “most of the time”: The place where truly diehard RV users live or stay most of the time may in fact be the RV, if they keep to a steady rotation of visiting friends and relatives for weeks at a time. The 32 RV-using snowbirds interviewed by Mings

2

For the purposes of the study, “recreational vehicle is defined to include all types of motorhomes, conventional travel trailers, fifth-wheel travel trailers, folding camping trailers, and truck campers” (Curtin, 2001:5).

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

(2001) constitute a rather small sample; still, of that number, some 20 percent do not maintain a permanent residence.

  • Inaccessibility by common enumeration techniques: By their nature, intensive RV users can be difficult to reach by physical mail, much less in a timely fashion. Hence, it is possible that a census questionnaire could be sent to a home they maintain, or to the home of friends or relatives where RVers commonly return, but there is no guarantee that the people in question will be there to receive or answer it. Or they may also rely on a rented post office box for the accumulation of their physical mail and thus might not be included in the census mailout population to begin with. The constancy with which they are on the road means that they can be difficult to reach by personal visit; they might be contacted by a one-shot deployment of enumerators to campgrounds (e.g., a T-Night-type operation as described in Section 4–C), but they might not. The best chance of their inclusion in the census might be from proxy reporting by a neighbor or family member, but that approach may impair the accuracy of the data.

  • Incomplete inventory of RV campsites: Mings (2001), as summarized by Hunter et al. (2003), found that some of the sites where he interviewed dedicated RV-using snowbirds (with no other residence) were not visited by enumerators in any census operation. He urged that future censuses pay more attention to undeveloped and public land campsites rather than commercial RV resorts and privately owned campgrounds. Public land campsites differ from their commercial counterparts in at least two respects that further complicate census enumeration matters. First, they typically do not offer any kind of mail delivery (some commercial RV grounds do), making even a fluke census questionnaire delivery unlikely. Second, public grounds typically impose a limit on the length of stay—for instance, 14 days—that encourages frequent moving by their users (Hunter et al., 2003:5).

4–A.3
Commuter Workers and Commuter Marriage Partners

Work and employment can be a source of ambiguity in residence definitions for a variety of reasons. In the next section we discuss cases where ambiguity stems from the nature of the job itself; here, we discuss ambiguity caused by the location of work. Economic or family circumstances compel some people to live lengthy distances from their work location, in the exurbs and rural expanses surrounding metropolitan areas. These long-distance commuter workers may live one place (near work) during the work week but return to another the rest of the time, making it difficult to identify one usual residence.

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

From the survey or census context, the problem of trying to obtain information from such a commuter worker—single, without family—is vexing enough. More difficult still are “commuter marriages” where work conditions may split spouses or family members. Each party, reached separately, may not think of the place where he or she lives simply for the purpose of going to their job as their “usual” residence. Commuter marriages are one of many changing and evolving structures that have drawn the attention of family demographers in the past few decades.

Actual data on the extent of commuter workers or commuter marriages are difficult or impossible to obtain. For a group for which so little is known about its basic size and trends, the commuter population has nonetheless drawn a great deal of attention in residence discussions. In summarizing the 1986 Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics (COPAFS) residence rules workshop, CEC Associates (1987:23) wondered whether “usual residence” was the appropriate benchmark for this group and whether something more akin to “an ‘habitual’ residence, perhaps that residence where the person has lived consistently over a longer period of time,” would be more meaningful. More fundamentally, the report focused on a critical concern in addressing this group: namely, the tendency for people to connect “household” with family, rather than the census concept of “household” as a collection of people at a housing unit. Choices in treating commuter workers can induce “potential bias of family composition data, creating a class of fictitious single parent families, possibly with incomes greatly underrepresented by excluding that of the absent spouse.”3 CEC Associates (1987:22) concluded that the rule for commuter workers “probably needs to be retained” for the 1990 census, but that “research needs to be undertaken to determine the impact of this rule on family and household statistics, on occupancy statistics, and most importantly on apportionment and redistricting data.”

The 2000 census residence rules attempted to add some clarity to the handling of commuter workers, though how well that worked is unclear. Rolark (1995:5) observed that the 1990 residence rules strictly considered commuter workers as “persons with one residence where they stayed on weekends and another residence where they stayed during the week while working”; hence, the rules would count the weekday residence as the usual residence since it would be the place where the greatest amount of time was spent in a given week. “Other patterns of staying (e.g., one month away, one month home, etc.) were not explicitly addressed.” With the attachment on weekly, monthly, and yearly cycles included in the 2000 rules, the Bureau opted to leave determination of the appropriate time cycle to the respondent; “persons having

3

This specific phenomenon regarding family and household data is not a specific concern for the 2010 short-form-only census, since household income is traditionally a long-form (and now ACS) question.

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

a weekly, monthly, or other cycle of commuting should be counted at the place where they spend the most time in that week, month, or other cycle.” However, the decision was not universally accepted by the staff committee developing the rules:

Some team members strongly disagreed with this decision feeling that this rule does not provide enough guidance to cover the varied patterns of commuter workers. Those who disagreed also felt that, from a respondent’s perspective social attachments were stronger determinants of usual residence than the place where the person slept most nights. They felt that although some family members worked and lived away from the family home, they would still be included on the form that his/her family filled out, despite what the rules stated.

Though the Rolark memo implies a more flexible concept of commuter worker arrangements, the phrase “commuter workers” only occurs in the discussion of a “weekly cycle” in the 2000 census residence rules. In addition, the Web-posted version of the residence rules speaks only to “commuter workers living away part of the week while working,” advising that they be “counted at the residence where they stay most of the week.”

The National Household Travel Survey (NHTS), administered by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics and the Federal Highway Administration, provides some empirical glimpses at long-distance commutes.4 The NHTS defines “stretch commutes” as those involving trips of at least 50 miles one way: 2001 NHTS data estimated that 3.3 million Americans stretch commute annually, with about 19 percent of those commuters traveling one-way distances of 100 miles or more. In a 4-week period (20 business days), 65 percent of those stretch commuters with a travel distance of 50–99 miles made the commute 16 or more days; that percentage drops to 33 percent for those with one-way trips of 100–199 miles and to 12 percent for drives of 200 or more miles. What the survey does not immediately reflect is changes to household structures that result from these commuter patterns—for example, 65 percent of commuters traveling 200 or more miles make that commute only 1–4 days in a 4-week period, but it is not clear whether that is because the traveler maintains a second residence closer to the work location.

Nested under the broad heading of commuter workers is one very small, highly mobile, and very influential subpopulation—members of Congress.5 The Bureau’s procedural history of the 1970 census reports that “each member of Congress had the option of being enumerated at his Washington-area

4

For additional information on the NHTS, see http://www.bts.gov/programs/national_household_travel_survey [8/1/06].

5

Similar arguments hold for state legislators, who may need to have residences in the state capital while also maintaining residence in their home districts. In many states, though, legislative sessions are short duration.

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

address in his home State. For Congressmen and Senators who made the latter choice, the appropriate population and housing data were tabulated for his home address” (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1970:8-2). Mann (1987) suggests that the same choice was offered in 1980, and the the U.S. Supreme Court’s summary of the government’s brief in Franklin v. Massachusetts (Box 2-5) noted this provision as well. The residence rules for the 1990 census indicated that “the Census Bureau plans to count Members of Congress either at their Washington, D.C. area address or at their home state residence, dependent upon which one they consider to be their usual residence” in following the instructions on the questionnaire. For 2000, it is not clear whether any special program was in place, but members of Congress were listed as an example of a multiple-residence category to be handled by rule 2—no guidance on whether a weekly, monthly, or yearly cycle was most applicable. The counting of members of Congress is one instance for which the difference between different standards of defining residence—and the varying standards used by federal and state agencies—are particularly vivid, as strict adherence to a usual residence standard defined by spending four or more nights a week in a place would seem to make the great majority of them ineligible for reelection from their districts, inasmuch as they would be “residents” of the Washington area (Mann, 1987:7–8).6

4–A.4
Residential Ambiguity Due to Occupation

The basic nature of work and employment can serve to complicate residence patterns. As cases for which a strict interpretation of living or staying someplace “most of the time” can be problematic, Sweet (1987:12) suggested:

Consider the long haul truck driver. Perhaps he (or she) is on the road 200 or more days a year. Yet he has a family and maintains a household at some fixed location. He and his family regard him as a member of this household, and it would seem to be a mistake not to classify this person as a member of his household. Other occupations where a similar pattern might often occur include traveling sales people and installers of large, complex equipment. What distinguishes this group from others that we have discussed is that they normally do not maintain another residence in a fixed location somewhere else.

In such cases, “it would seem desirable to classify these persons as residents of their home”—wherever they might specify it to be—“even though they do not spend a large share of the time there.”

6

Likewise, absolute adherence to a Census Bureau-style “usual residence” standard (“live and stay most of the time”) in all settings would typically establish both the President and Vice President of the United States as residents of the District of Columbia. The 12th Amendment’s stipulation that the two must be from different states would then seem to make the president-vice president ticket ineligible for reelection.

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

The idea that people employed in transportation and related services have jobs that require constant movement and extended time away from “home” by their very nature is a long-standing one in the census context. We comment on the rules applying to seaborne personnel (emphasizing the military but applying as well to private-sector crews such as freight ships and cruise ships) in Section 3–F. Enumerator instructions for the 1900 census directed that “persons engaged in internal transportation”—including “canal men, expressmen, [and] railroad men”—should “be reported as of their families, and not where they may be temporarily staying on [Census Day]” provided that “they habitually return to their homes in the intervals of their occupations.” The 1950 enumerator instructions added to the list of examples of persons “engaged in transportation services or traveling” to include bus drivers, railway mail clerks, and traveling salesmen. These persons “usually have homes to which they return at intervals and which constitute their usual place of residence”; they were to be counted at that place unless they had no such usual place of residence, in which they were supposed to be counted where they were found. Rule 1 of the 2000 census residence rules covered “[persons who live] in this household but [are] temporarily absent on Census Day on a visit, business trip, vacation, or in connection with a job (e.g., bus driver, traveling salesperson, boat operator),” and ruled that they be counted at the household. Other occupations that fit this general type include airline flight crews and employees of moving companies.

Previous census enumerator instructions and residence rules have also covered a group for whom the opposite situation may apply, in which a person’s workplace and residence may coincide: live-in or long-term domestic workers and caregivers. In 2000, such workers were to be counted as part of the household provided that the person “works for and lives in this household and has no other home.”

The long shifts—often multiple 24-hour periods—that are part of the work experience of public safety personnel like firefighters or paramedics/emergency medical technicians can also blur the line between “work” and “home” locations. The relative ease of transportation and the increasingly large geographic scope of companies and corporations also creates some jobs where extended travel (e.g., supervising a geographically disperse set of plants or facilities) is the norm. Companies may detail employees to a regional office elsewhere in (or out of) the country for weeks or even months, or a person could be transferred full time to another position elsewhere but elect not to move their family members from their present homes.

4–A.5
Minority Men

Studies of census error since the 1950 census have pointed to high net undercount among adult males of minority racial groups, particularly among

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

young black men. While the 2000 census was successful in reducing the net undercount among minority race groups, minority males are still a group that have historically proven to be complicated to count accurately. Though the undercount for black males decreased in 2000, rates were still elevated for them and other racial and ethnic minority groups, notably Hispanics, relative to whites.

A small-sample but intensive study of households in predominantly black inner-city areas by Valentine and Valentine (1971a,b) suggested one possible contributing source to this “missing men” problem. Later described by Brownrigg and Wobus (1993:156) as “the man under the bed” hypothesis, the argument suggested in this research holds that minority men may be deliberately omitted (concealed) from household counts, either because the men “do not want to be found” or “the men are intentionally not revealed by respondents for ulterior reasons.” The Valentine and Valentine (1971a,b) analysis found rates of missing young adult and adult males as high as 61 percent in their small-area study, and they concluded that “practically all the significant inaccurate information came from adult females who [neglected] to mention productive men residing in their domiciles” (quoted in Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology, 1990:43).

Many of the households where males were unreported received welfare assistance; accordingly, a suggested reason for the failure to count the men was a legacy of welfare “man in the house” policies.7 Under the “man in the house” rules used by some states, welfare payments could be cut off if it were shown that a man was present in the house (ostensibly, filling a “substitute father” role and providing support). In the census context, then, respondents might be unwilling to report to any federal agency the presence of males in the household. “Man in the house” rules were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on Alabama’s policy in King v. Smith (392 U.S. 309, 1968), but whether people realized that the rules had changed was a different matter; indeed, contemporary researchers still find that some people believe that some variant of a “man in the house” rule is in effect (Edin and Lein, 1997). Fear of jeopardizing eligibility for benefits due to the presence of a male in the household (and, hence, another resource provider) may still hold among people who are residents of public or federally subsidized housing.

The notion of deliberate concealment of household members—particularly men—was later corroborated by Tourangeau et al. (1997), who found that minority males were more likely to be omitted from a household roster where full names were required and more likely to be reported in list-

7

The Valentines also speculated that another financial consideration might motivate the failure to count men in some households: “many of the unreported men were also engaged in some form of illegal economic activity, e.g., the stolen goods market,” so suppressing mention of those men had the added incentive of preserving a household income stream (Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology, 1990:44).

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

ings when full names were not requested. This finding of sensitivity of the reporting of names was consistent with ethnographic work by Hainer (1987): interviewers found that “any question that was linked to anyone’s name was too personal and threatening,” and that “informants assumed that any information given to one source is shared by all others” (Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology, 1990:44).8

Other analysts suggest that a more benign explanation—confusion, not concealment—may contribute to the census undercount of minority men. Specifically, analysis of data from the 1993 Census Bureau-sponsored Living Situation Survey by Martin (1999) found inconsistencies between people listed on rosters as having any attachment to the household in a 2-month period and the people identified by respondents as “members” of the household. None of the reasons specified for omitting a person as a member of the household hinted at concealment or deception; rather, the explanations spoke to the nonmembers as having tenuous ties to the household, whether for family or economic reasons (e.g., not contributing to rent) or because they were perceived as only being temporary or transitory residents. The confusion hypothesis is consistent with the findings of Iversen et al. (1999); that study administered the 1990 census questionnaire (a mix of both short and long forms) to families in a poor area of inner-city Philadelphia. Using cognitive testing techniques, respondents were encouraged to think aloud as they completed the form and were debriefed afterward, generating a question-by-question description (and explanation) of errors and difficulties. Almost all of the completed forms (104 of 107) included at least one error. The think-aloud comments suggested major problems with literacy and interpretation of even basic questions; a cognitively complex question such as the basic household roster—prefaced, in 1990, by a lengthy presentation of “include” and “exclude” instructions—was particularly troublesome.

An additional reason why some minority men may be missed in the census is because of the lack of a permanent attachment to any particular household. Instead, they may move frequently between the homes of their mothers, their kin, their girlfriends, and their peers, so that a respondent at any one of these locations might not feel obliged to report them in a household listing (Edin and Lein, 1997).

None of the speculated reasons for the undercount of minority males are adequate, in isolation, to explain the full magnitude of the problem. For instance, by the logic of the concealment hypothesis (the fear that reporting men in households might jeopardize eligibility of benefits), the major drop in welfare enrollment in the mid-1990s should have yielded a major increase

8

An ethnographic study done for the 2000 census focused specifically on a group of young urban male gang members. Those ethnographic interviews suggested sensitivity over confidentiality—coupled with a general “strong aversion to the government” and law enforcement—as possible reasons for concealment from census returns (Hunter et al., 2003:2–3).

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

in the minority male count in 2000. Though the estimated net undercount rate for black males was reduced relative to 1990, the finding of an undercount among minority men remained intact. The exact combination of causal factors for undercount—concealment, confusion, and high mobility among them—remains a noticeable gap for further research to fill.

4–A.6
Migrant Farm Workers

The highly detailed enumerator instructions of the 1950 census were the first to explicitly mention the counting of worker camps: “persons in railroad, highway, or other construction camps, lumber camps, … or places that have shifting populations composed mainly of persons with no fixed places of residence” were to be counted where found. The special case of agricultural worker camps, occupied by migrant farm laborers during harvest periods, was explicitly referenced in the 1980 and 1990 census residence rules (see Box 5-4) and later in rule 14 of the 2000 census residence rules. The 1990 rule took a stronger stance than the 1950 instructions, directing that such agricultural workers be counted at the camp and omitting the clause about the rule applying to workers with no other usual place of residence. The 1980 and 2000 rules permitted migrant agricultural workers to specify a “usual home elsewhere” location; if no such usual home elsewhere was specified, they were to be counted at the camp.

The class of agricultural workers who reside in camps or in owner-provided barracks or dormitory-type housing during harvest periods is only one part—and likely a small part—of the overall class of migrant farm workers. Particular attention has been focused on the temporary farm labor pool composed of foreign migrants, particularly from Mexico but also from other Central American countries, in light of ongoing debates on immigration policy in the United States. As noted in discussing our charge in Chapter 1, our focus is not on whether illegal immigrants should be counted in the census but rather—assuming the goal of generating a resident count—to discuss how residence rules and instructions apply and may be improved.

Just as terms like “usual residence” are complex and can be defined in multiple ways, the meaning of “migrant” farm workers can also vary considerably. Garcia and Gonzales (1995:7) observe that some definitions focus on those workers who are in constant motion, “mov[ing] from one farm area to another in search of agricultural employment. This worker moves about without ever settling down permanently in one location.” Other definitions incorporate a seasonal or temporal dimension, “depict[ing] a migrant as a worker who is in an area for a given amount of time” for the harvest of a particular crop; “once the crops are picked, the worker moves on to another area or returns home.” A more expansive definition relaxes the specificity on one particular crop or one particular season. Under this definition, “a migrant is a worker who leaves

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

his home community for other areas to work for an indefinite amount of time, that may vary from three months to three years.” The key characteristic under this definition is that the worker “does not create a new permanent home in the area” but rather “returns to his home base after he has earned what he set out to make.”

The local area and time-specific impacts of migrant farm workers can be massive. For example, Palerm (1994:6) estimated that—on its own—strawberry harvesting in California’s Santa Maria Valley consumes 8.5 million person-hours, “represent[ing] nearly 4,000 full-time jobs if employment were distributed evenly throughout the year. In actuality Santa Maria strawberry farms employ as many as 10,000 individual workers, many of them intermittently, during a four-to-five month period and some during even shorter periods of time.” While some agricultural products in the valley (such as broccoli and cauliflower) are harvested nearly continuously, other crops (such as grapes and celery) have short, well-defined harvest seasons that—like strawberries—require a significant short-term labor force. Ethnographic researchers have also observed that migrant farm workers from Mexico have a broader geographic effect than some might expect, as they “are no longer limiting themselves to farm areas in the U.S. southwest. Today, they venture to communities and work in agricultural industries found throughout the country, including the U.S. northeast. In Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey, for example, vegetable, fruit, and horticultural producers are hiring Mexican laborers in large numbers” for harvest periods (Garcia and Gonzales, 1995:2).

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration sponsors the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS), which directly interviews farm workers in the continental United States; the survey aims to interview 3,200 workers each fiscal year. Interviews are administered three times a year (based on the seasonality of the industry), in February, June, and October. The 2001–2002 report of survey findings (U.S. Department of Labor, 2005) provides information on a range of characteristics of migrant workers:

  • 42 percent of the crop worker force are migrants, defined as traveling at least 75 miles during a 12-month period to do farm and agricultural work. NAWS analysts further differentiate migrant workers as shuttle migrants (who work multiple sites in a 75-mile radius of a single U.S. location) and follow-the-crop migrants (who travel to multiple U.S. locations to do farm work, depending on the harvest season). Foreign-born newcomers are new workers to the survey who have not yet demonstrated a migration pattern. Table 4-1 illustrates the shares of these groups as a percentage of all migrants and of all hired crop labor, as well as the percentages within each group who report that they have

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

Table 4-1 Classification of Farm Workers

Migrant Type

1993–1994

2001–2002

Living Apart from Children, as Percent of All Migrants

Percent of All Farm Workers

Percent of All Migrants

Percent of All Farm Workers

Percent of All Migrants

“Home” Outside theUnited States

International shuttlea

13

29

13

30

43

International follow-the-cropb

5

10

2

5

7

Foreign-born newcomerc

10

23

16

38

35

“Home” Inside the United States

Domestic shuttlea

9

18

6

13

6

Domesticfollow-the-cropb

9

20

6

14

9

Nonmigrant

52

58

NOTES: Percentages do not add to 100 percent due to rounding.

a Shuttle migrants may work several farm sites when not at their “home” location, but do all of their farm labor work in a 75-mile radius within the United States.

b Follow-the-crop migrants travel to various locations in the United States to do farm labor, depending on the season.

c New entrant to the farm labor force who has not yet demonstrated a migration schedule.

SOURCE: U.S. Department of Labor (2005:Table 1.1).

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

children at their “home location” who do not live with them while they are working.

  • 75 percent of the hired crop labor force were born in Mexico and 23 percent in the United States.

  • 83 percent identified themselves as members of a Hispanic group.

  • Only 21 percent are legal permanent residents of the United States; 53 percent are not legal immigrants and are not authorized to work in the United States.

  • 61 percent of the migrant farm workforce reported living in rented property owned by someone other than their employer; 27 percent lived in housing provided for free by the employer, while 6 percent rented from the employer. Only 1 percent reported staying free of charge with family or friend, and 4 percent reported owning their housing property.

  • 6 percent of migrant farm workers (and 3 percent of all farm workers) reported living in dormitory or barracks facilities.

The limited glimpse at migrant farm workers’ living conditions provided by the NAWS highlights some of the conceptual difficulties involved in contacting them in the census and gathering accurate residence data. The illegal and undocumented status of a large share of the population raises the possibility of undercounting the workers: contacted employers may be apprehensive about providing full reports if they hire undocumented workers, or householders may not readily “volunteer information about the presence of undocumented kin or friends in the home” (Palerm, 1994:26, 28). The NAWS data suggest that only a very small share of farm workers live in dormitory- or barracks-type housing, such as might be reached in group quarters enumeration. Rather, most of the workers contacted in the survey reported living in rental property, possibly sharing the space with other laborers. These short-term rentals pose difficulty for enumeration in several respects—the likelihood that an English-language questionnaire would reach a predominantly Spanish-speaking household, the possible perceived disincentive for foreign citizens to cooperate with the U.S. census or to reply to a government survey (if their immigration status is illegal), the tenuousness of ties to the housing unit, and the possible inaccuracy of proxy reporting by neighbors or landlords. The seasonal nature of crops may also work against complete enumeration due to the timing of Census Day. Returning to the Santa Maria Valley, California example, Palerm (1994:12) comments:

[On April 1, Census Day,] only one-half or less of the [seasonal] migrants are actually there. By early April the strawberry and lettuce harvest is just beginning to build-up steam but is not yet in full swing. Moreover, having just arrived, most migrants are still in the process of making their

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

living arrangements for the season, creating with their great numbers havoc in the local housing situation and probably producing the worst possible conditions for the completion of a sound and accurate population count.

4–B
COMPLEX HOUSEHOLD STRUCTURES: THE CHANGING NATURE OF FAMILIES

As discussed in Chapter 2, the construct of the family is fundamentally linked to notions of usual residence or household composition. It is also one that varies across cultures and has shifted with time; demographic and sociological research continue to probe “the dimensions of long-run changes in the American family” (Ruggles and Brower, 2003:73):

The past 150 years have witnessed extraordinary change in American living arrangements. In 1850, for example, 70 percent of the elderly resided with their children, and 11 percent lived alone or with only a spouse; by 1990, only 16 percent resided with children, and 70 percent resided alone or with a spouse only. The changes have been almost as great for the young: since 1910, the percentage of children under age five residing without two parents has increased more than fourfold, to 27 percent in 1990; among blacks, the figure is 67 percent.9

Some of the range of contemporary household and family types is expressed in Table 4-2, which describes the number of children (under age 18) in various household compositions using data from the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). Single-parent households are increasingly common, accounting for roughly one-quarter of childrens’ living situations; about 4 percent of children live with neither parent.

Some of the living arrangements described in this chapter constitute what Census Bureau researchers have termed “complex households”—“those where the web of relationships within the household is other than one nuclear family (i.e., nuclear family being married couple with or without its own biological children).” Examples of these complex households include the presence of nonrelatives in the household, such as unmarried partners and gay partners; more distant relatives such as grandparents, cousins, and aunts and uncles; children who are shared across households; and “people who may be mobile or ambiguous in terms of household membership” (Schwede, 2003:vii). The challenges involved in identifying and labeling such complex households are plentiful and interesting, including the interpretation of the census questionnaire’s relationship question depending on which household

9

Ruggles and Brower (2003) cite a then-forthcoming version of Carter et al. (2006) as the source of these data.

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

Table 4-2 Children Under Age 18 by Household Composition, 1996 and 2001 (in thousands)

Children Living With

2001

1996

Two Parents

51,113

50,685

Married parents

48,987

49,186

Unmarried parents

2,126

1,499

Biological mother and father

45,103

44,708

Married parents

43,287

43,401

Biological mother and stepfather

4,050

3,723

Biological father and stepmother

815

1,004

Biological mother and adoptive father

445

479

Biological father and adoptive mother

56

37

Adoptive mother and father

605

702

Adoptive mother and stepfather

16

23

Adoptive father and stepmother

19

9

Stepmother and stepfather

4

One Parent

18,472

18,165

Mother only

16,297

16,340

Biological

15,980

16,051

Father only

2,175

1,825

Biological

2,082

1,737

Neither Parent

2,917

2,644

Grandparents only

1,407

1,266

Other relatives only

889

688

Nonrelatives only

520

622

Other arrangement

101

69

At Least One Biological Parent

68,531

67,739

At Least One Stepparent

5,081

4,902

At Least One Adoptive Parent

1,372

1,484

At Least One Foster Parent

260

313

Total

72,501

71,494

NOTES: —; rounds to zero.

SOURCE: Kreider and Fields (2005:Table 1), based on tabulations from SIPP, 2001 Panel, Wave 2.

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

member—as “Person 1”—completes the form.10 Our review in this section, however, is limited to the effects of these household structures on the derivation of household rosters and counts.

4–B.1
Children in Joint Custody

At the 1986 COPAFS residence rules workshop, Lowry (1987:17–18) observed that “the table of residence rules [for the 1980 census] does not explicitly mention children who divide their time between two or more residences, usually because their parents are divorced or separated.” The rule that seemed most applicable to these children is the general guidance of only counting nonpermanent “visitors” at the household if they have no other place where they live and sleep most of the time. However, he concluded, “I doubt that a divorced parent who completes a regular household census form would be likely to [consider] his or her offspring as a ‘visitor.’”

No residence rule in the 1990 census specifically mentioned children in joint custody, but the 2000 census residence rules added joint custody as an example case in rule 2, which covered cases where residence follows a weekly, monthly, yearly, or other cycle. Though the rule text does not specify which of these is most applicable, the attachment defining the cycle types implies that joint custody children are supposed to be counted based on where they spend the majority of the month:

Some children live with one parent for one week out of the month and the other parent the remaining three weeks during the month. We consider these persons to be on a “monthly cycle” and they should be counted at the place where they spend most of their time during the month (e.g., children in joint custody situations, etc.).

If time is split equally between multiple residences, the rule implies, the children should be counted where they are on Census Day.

The Panel to Review the 2000 Census (National Research Council, 2004c:47) speculated that double counting of children in joint custody arrangements—as part of the broader population with ties to more than one residence—was an important source of duplication in the 2000 census. Evidence on this point was provided by two Census Bureau coverage evaluation

10

“Interrelationships among other persons in the household can be masked and not be iden-tifiable,” and family structures within “households” can be difficult or impossible to recover, depending on who fills out the census form (Schwede, 2003:viii). For example, consider a case where a man and woman live together, unmarried, along with the woman’s child from a previous relationship. If the man is the census respondent, the woman may be reported as an unmarried partner or an “other nonrelative,” while the child would likely be “other nonrelative”; the biological link between woman and child is obscured. If the woman is the respondent, the biological link between her and her child would be preserved, but it would be ambiguous to family and household researchers whether the male is the child’s biological father or not.

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

studies. A detailed reinterview of 17,500 people and a clerical review of their census records identified children in joint custody as a source of error: they were counted at a census household when proper application of the residence rules would place them at another location (Adams and Krejsa, 2001).11 In addition, methodology for matching census records based on name and date of birth to detect duplicate census records (discussed further in Section 8–B) suggested spikes in the age distribution of estimated duplicates that were consistent with children in joint custody. This finding was first noted when the detailed matching was done within the coverage evaluation samples (Fay, 2002a) and corroborated by matches of the entire set of census records against itself (Fay, 2004).

The general problem of defining residence for children in joint custody arrangements is complicated by the number of ways that these arrangements come about. Custody awards may be made by judicial ruling as part of the formal dissolution of a marriage; in describing the nature of shared custody arrangements and trends in their development, much of our discussion is focused on this group because of the formality of the arrangement and its presence in legal records. However, it is very important to note that shared custody arrangements can arise without a formal, legal divorce: they can develop in cases where a divorce is not fully executed, such as a separation or estrangement. They may also arise in the absence of a marriage; in Section 4–B.2 we discuss cohabiting couples and the problems inherent in counting children in such households, but it is also essential to consider the question of how children are counted when cohabiting couples split up. Much of what is known about the magnitude of and trends in custody arrangements focuses on custody awards after divorce; detailed empirical information on more informal shared custody arrangements is scarce.

The institution of joint custody arrangements in divorce proceedings is a relatively recent phenomenon. By the 1920s, a strong preference among divorce courts to award custody to mothers “became as firmly fixed as the earlier paternal preference” that had dominated for decades. As divorce rates escalated in the 1960s, fathers in divorce cases began to argue that maternal-dominated custody decisions violated equal protection and constituted sex discrimination, resulting—following passage of the federal Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act in 1970—in the adoption of gender-neutral custody laws based solely on the “best interests” of the child (Kelly, 1994:122). Over the course of the 1970s, the notion of “joint custody” emerged as a viable option in divorce proceedings. California passed the first law formally recognizing

11

The 17,500 people in this evaluation follow-up study were drawn from the “E-sample” whose census records has been matched to a “P-sample” (independent Accuracy and Coverage Evaluation interviews) to estimate net census error.

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

Box 4-1

Types of Child Custody Arrangements

Sole Custody

  • Sole legal custodyCustodial parent is assigned all legal rights, duties, and powers as parent; all decisions affecting welfare of child. Noncustodial parent has limited rights and powers; has access to child’s medical and school records.

  • Sole physical custodyCustodial parent has primary physical custody of child. Noncustodial parent is usually awarded visitation rights.

Joint Custody

  • Joint legal custody—Both parents retain rights and powers to make decisions regarding child’s health and welfare. Decisions must be specified in some states to preserve the authority.

  • Joint physical custody—Both parents retain right to share in day-to-day residential care of child; generally not defined as equal sharing, but intended to grant substantial periods of time to each parent.

Divided Custody—Each parent has child for a portion of the year or in alternating years. Each parent has legal rights for decision making when child is in that parent’s care.


Split Custody—Each parent has sole legal and physical custody of one or more children; noncustodial parent has visitation rights.


SOURCE: Kelly (1994:Table 1).

joint custody in 1979; “by 1991, more than 40 states had statues in which joint custody was either an option or a preference” (Kelly, 1994:123).

Kelly (1994) summarizes various types of custody arrangements; these are listed in Box 4-1. Within this framework, an important point related to the residence determination of affected children is that “joint” physical custody is not necessarily (and perhaps not often) a strict fifty-fifty divide. Instead, variation in custody awards and state laws means that the “actual resident time [that a child may spend with a custodial parent] may range along a continuum from somewhat expanded visiting to equal time in each household” (Kelly, 1994:23). Cancian and Meyer (1998:150) suggest differentiating between equal shared (physical) custody and unequal shared custody, defining the latter as an arrangement where the child lives with one parent 30–49 percent of the time and with the other parent the remainder of the time. The cutoff of 30 percent is relevant for their analysis of Wisconsin divorces because that figure defines a threshold in child-support formula calculations.

The itemization of types of custody arrangements suggests a rigidity in classification; this is not always the case. In considering children in joint custody, it is important to bear in mind that even families with legal custody arrangements do not always follow them: the legal decision about which parent(s) a child will live with does not always correspond to where the child actually lives. This may be even more likely as children grow up and as the

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

time since the initial custody decree increases. Even families who do not go to court for a legal settlement may still have children who spend part of the time in each parent’s household. Actual living arrangements among these children may be sufficiently fluid to resist easy categorization and are certainly more dynamic than is documented in administrative records of custody awards.

A major gap in understanding the size and dynamics of children in joint and other custody arrangements is that there is no uniform national-level source of data on child custody arrangements. At least two major federal data collection programs provide some information on shared custody situations: vital statistics and the Current Population Survey (CPS). Both have limitations, though, and are generally focused on legally ordered custody arrangements (as in divorce proceedings).

The first of these data sources is the vital statistics program of the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). Until 1995 NCHS gathered information on (physical) custody arrangements as part of the divorce portion of the vital statistics, compiling counts from records of registered divorces maintained by state government departments. However, budget constraints led NCHS to abandon its detailed marriage and divorce data files in favor of basic counts and rates. Yet even when the detailed data were being gathered, relatively few states reported the full data; the current basic count data continue to suffer from inconsistent or nonexistent reporting, to the extent that NCHS no longer publishes a national count of divorces.12 (A supplementary source of detailed divorce data—a marital and fertility history supplement to the Current Population Survey, separate from the child support supplement discussed below—was also terminated in 1995. As a result, there exists no national source of information on divorce trends in the late 1990s and early 2000s.)

The most recent surviving data from the vital statistics program to be analyzed by NCHS staff date from 1989–1990 and include reports of physical custody arrangements from 15 and 19 states in 1989 and 1990, respectively. Those data, shown in Table 4-3, suggest that about 40 percent of divorces include a determination of custody. Among those cases where custody is awarded, roughly 80 percent are a grant of sole physical custody to one parent, 15 percent are joint custody, and the remainder either split custody or placement of children with another person entirely.

Short of detailed information on the number of children involved in shared custody agreements, the vital statistics data do shed light on trends in divorce in the United States. Divorces need not involve custody awards—there may be no children in the family, or the children may have reached legal adulthood—but trends in divorce are at least a rough benchmark to bear in

12

NCHS attributes this latter decision to lack of reports from California, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Louisiana, and Oklahoma (National Center for Health Statistics, 2005).

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

Table 4-3 Divorces by Whether and to Whom Physical Custody of Children was Awarded, Selected States, 1989 and 1990

 

1989a

1990a

Count

Percent

Count

Percent

Custody Awarded

128,507

40.2

110,787

38.2

Sole, to husband

11,186

3.5

9,046

3.1

Sole, to wife

92,330

28.9

79,001

27.2

Joint

20,183

6.3

18,980

6.5

Splitb

3,104

1.0

2,579

0.9

Other person

1,704

0.5

1,181

0.4

No Custody Awardedc

149,674

46.8

131,561

45.3

Not Statedd

41,514

13.0

47,818

16.5

Total

319,695

100.0

290,166

100.0

a The 1989 data are based on reports from 15 states (Alabama, Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah, Wisconsin, and Wyoming), and the 1990 data on reports from 19 states (adding Alaska, Nebraska, Rhode Island, and Virginia).

b Some children of the divorcing family were awarded to one parent and some to the other parent.

c Includes divorces in which the number of children under 18 years of age was reported as “none,” and therefore the custody item was not applicable; also includes divorces in which children were reported, but no custody was awarded.

d Includes divorces where custody was not reported, except those in which the number of children was reported as none. Such divorces were assigned to “no custody awarded.”

SOURCE: Clarke (1995:Table 17).

mind when considering trends in shared custody. Based on data from reporting states, the vital statistics on divorce suggest a major growth from a steady state of roughly 400,000 divorces per year from 1950 through 1960 to a peak of 1.213 million divorces in 1981 (Clarke, 1995). In 1990, an estimated 4.7 million children (7.3 percent) lived with an unmarried parent, 5.9 million (9.1 percent) with a divorced parent, and 4.8 million (7.4 percent) with a separated or divorced parent (Shiono and Quinn, 1994). Since the 1981 peak, “marital dissolution rates have been constant for almost two decades” (Bumpass and Lu, 2000:29).

Although national-level compilation of court and government records on custody arrangements is lacking, researchers have studied custody issues using detailed extracts of court records. Cancian and Meyer (1998) use Wisconsin court record data from 21 counties, compiled over several years, and summa-

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

rize findings from other studies. Additional court record compilations, for sets of counties, have been compiled for California (Maccoby and Mnookin, 1992), Michigan (Fox and Kelly, 1995), and Minnesota (Christensen et al., 1990).

A second national source of information on custody arrangements is the CPS conducted by the Census Bureau. Every two years from 1994 to 2002, a child support supplement to the CPS (conducted in March/April) asked survey respondents whether they had ever been awarded joint legal or physical custody of a child. Specifically, the questionnaire asked whether “a court or judge” gave the respondent custody (U.S. Census Bureau, 1998:Items S503, S504). Child Trends (2002) analyze data from the 1994, 1996, and 1998 supplements, and some of their calculations are shown in Table 4-4. Generally, the CPS data suggest a relatively stable distribution of custody awards in aggregate; joint custody awards account for 8–9 percent of settlements, with the most frequent result (68 percent of cases) being the mother being awarded sole legal and physical custody. The more recent sets of CPS child support data corroborate this result, as summarized by Grall (2003:1):

In the spring of 2002, an estimated 13.4 million parents had custody of 21.5 million children under 21 years of age whose other parent lived somewhere else. About 5 of every 6 custodial parents were mothers (84.4 percent) and 1 in 6 were fathers (15.6 percent), proportions statistically unchanged since 1994.

The CPS data capture some part of the resolution of custody in out-of-wedlock cases, and that marital status has an effect on custody outcomes: unwed mothers are most likely to be awarded full legal and physical custody, while dissolved marriages are more likely to have shared custody of some sort.

For purposes of determining residence in the census and in surveys, the critical question is how each of the parents in a divorce understand and interpret questions about where their children live. A body of research summarized by Lin et al. (2004) and Schaeffer et al. (1998) suggests important differences in how divorced mothers and fathers report their childrens’ living arrangements; the two parents may report things differently (such as the amount of child support money paid), and each parent “tended to report that their children spent a greater number of nights with them than with the other parent” (Lin et al., 2004:386).

Lin et al. (2004) report the results of a survey of about 1,400 divorced parents in Wisconsin that speaks directly to responses to residence questions.13 Their work included both qualitative and quantitative assessments, allowing respondents to describe arrangements in their own words in open-ended responses as well as to provide a direct count of the number of nights spent in

13

The Lin et al. (2004) study was not limited to pairs of divorced parents; 440 of the 1,392 interviews were with only one of the parents in a proceedings.

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

Table 4-4 Type of Child Custody per Most Recent Agreement, 1994–1998 (in percent)

 

Mother Legal and Physical

Mother Physical, Joint Legal

Father Physical; Legal Sole or Joint

Joint Physical and Legal

Other

1994

68

8

12

8

4

Marital Status

Never married

85

3

6

2

4

Single, previously married

63

12

13

11

2

Currently married

62

7

15

9

7

1996

65

10

11

9

5

Marital Status

Never married

82

4

8

2

4

Single, previously married

56

14

14

14

2

Currently married

62

9

10

10

9

1998

68

7

10

9

6

Marital Status

Never married

83

2

7

3

4

Single, previously married

58

10

15

14

4

Currently married

65

7

9

10

9

NOTES: Estimates only calculated for households with a child (under age 21) who lives with one biological parent and whose other parent is absent. “Other” includes split custody arrangements.

SOURCE: Child Trends (2002:Tables P19.1–P.19.3), based on Child Support Supplement of the CPS, 1994, 1996, and 1998.

a location. Their results suggest important sensitivity to particular words—divorced fathers were less likely to use the explicit phrase “live with” in describing where their child lives, although they were more likely to explicitly say that the child “live[s] with” both parents. Asked to count how many nights the child spent living with their mother in a year, mothers placed the count about 44 days longer than did fathers. Their analysis concluded that “parents are more apt to say that their children live with one of the parents when children spend at least 58% of the time in the full year with one parent” (Lin et al., 2004:391). Divorced parents’ qualitative assessments of where their children live may vary from a count of nights stayed; even “when parents report the same number of nights that children spend with the mother, mothers are more likely than fathers to say that the child lives with the mother, and fathers are more likely than mothers to say that the children live with the father or both parents” (Lin et al., 2004:395).

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×
4–B.2
Cohabiting Couples

An increasingly important group in the studies of family dynamics are co-habiting couples who live together—perhaps for long periods of time—but do not marry.14 Though debates on the nature and effects of cohabitation frequently force cohabitation into a dichotomous framework, either as “a stage in courtship that leads to marriage or an alternative to marriage,” the reasons for living together (and for separating) are more complex than that framework allows (Seltzer, 2004:58).

Cohabitation rates have increased dramatically over the past three decades—the 1970 census found 523,000 households maintained by unmarried couples, compared with 4.9 million in 2000—and this growth has been shared among all demographic groups (see, e.g., Bumpass and Lu, 2000; Bumpass and Sweet, 1989; Simmons and O’Neill, 2001; Waite, 1995). The 1995 National Survey of Family Growth found that 45 percent of white non-Hispanic and black women aged 19–44 reported that they had ever lived in a cohabiting relationship, as had 39 percent of Hispanic women; those figures represented increases from the 1987–1988 wave of the survey, from 32 (white), 36 (black), and 30 (Hispanic) percent, respectively. “Marriage and remarriage rates have declined markedly, though these declines have been largely offset” as “cohabitation has grown from a rare and deviant behavior to the majority experience among cohorts of marriageable age” (Bumpass and Lu, 2000:29).

Perhaps the most basic conceptual challenge that cohabitation raises for collection of residence and household composition data is the length and nature of cohabiting relationships. Though cohabiting relationships can last years or decades, it is commonly a short-term pairing, “with about half lasting a year or less, only one-sixth lasting three years, and about a tenth lasting five years or longer” (Bumpass and Lu, 2000:33). The tenuousness and fragility of relationships in early stages can complicate questions about residence—at what point does the cohabiting partner switch from a person who “stays” here versus one who “lives” here? As Sweet (1987:11) describes, “the [cohabiting] process may begin with an occasional night together. Gradually one partner may spend more and more time in the household of the other, while maintaining their own apartment. Eventually one partner gives up his or her own place and they are unambiguously living together.” Short of that “unambiguous” level of commitment, “one partner may feel that they ‘live together,’ while the other partner may feel that he or she lives somewhere else, and merely stays here most, or all, of the time” (Sweet, 1987:11).

A critical question involved with the responses of cohabiting couples is how children in this situation are counted. Children of cohabiting couples

14

As with most research on cohabitation, our focus here is on heterosexual couples, though we comment on the special case of gay couples at the end of the section.

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

may be the biological child of both partners or of just one partner (long-term cohabiting couples may have children in the household who are the biological child of neither partner—adopted or foster children). Just as the adult partners in a couple may have discrepant ideas as to whether each person “lives” or “stays” in the household, the same ambiguity may carry over to the counting of children that are “his” or “hers” rather than “ours.”

In addition, cohabitation can be a transitory phenomenon, with partners moving in and out of cohabiting relationships. Just as partners in the relationship might not know whether the current cohabitation will last, parents or other family members might also view the arrangement as temporary or a passing thing; particularly for younger people living together, “enduring ties” might compel parents or others to count them at home.

Though attitudes toward cohabitation have relaxed over recent decades, it is not universally embraced either. Some sense of a lingering stigma could also be a mechanism for the “concealment” or denial of a coresident partner. This is particularly so for a special case within the general class of cohabiting couples: same-sex couples, for whom an enduring stigma and fear of discrimination may contribute to underreporting (Smith and Gates, 2001). Following Black et al. (2000), Smith and Gates (2001) compared the 601,209 same-sex households containing two people identified as “unmarried partners” by the 2000 census’ relationship question with other survey measures. They argue that the 2000 census undercounted gay and lesbians living in coresident relationships by 62 percent.

4–B.3
Recent Immigrants

The discussion in Section 4–A.6 focused on migrant farm workers, many of whom are undocumented persons who cross the U.S. border in search of employment; they were considered as a special case where employment is a cause of residential mobility. More generally, new migrants and immigrants to the United States present challenges for census enumeration due to their family structures and the living situations they create.

Analysis of the 2000 census public use microdata sample by Hernandez (2004) found that 47 percent of children in immigrant families live in crowded housing (defined as having more than one person per room), compared with 11 percent among children in native-born families. Immigrant children are also about twice as likely to have other people living in the household than native-born families (grandparents, other relatives besides parents and siblings, or nonrelatives). Several of the ethnographic studies conducted as part of the 1990 census focused on immigrant families, and concurred that “the most common living arrangement among the immigrants is an extended household. Nuclear families share their homes with kinsmen; they take in and shelter close relatives, like a parent, sibling, uncle or aunt, cousin, or compadre

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

or comadre [fictive kin/co-parents]. In many cases, the kinsmen are migrants, who work in the area without their families” (Garcia and Gonzales, 1995:18). A body of research (see, e.g., Massey, 1986; Singer and Massey, 1998; Curran and Rivero-Fuentes, 2003) examines the general settlement process of migrants arriving in the United States.

Immigrant households are also highly likely to face a considerable potential barrier to accurate enumeration: language. The Census Bureau defines a household as “linguistically isolated” if “all household members age 14 years or older speak a language other than English and have no English proficiency” (Lestina, 2003:iii). An evaluation conducted by the Census Bureau based on the 2000 census estimated that 4.1 percent of households are linguistically isolated, an increase from 3.2 percent in 1990. These households can comprise a major share of the total population of either counties or census tracts; eight counties in Texas consist of at least 25 percent linguistically isolated households, and 11 tracts nationwide are at least 75 percent linguistically isolated households (Lestina, 2003:iii).

Operationally, linguistically isolated households present complications because they are less likely to avail themselves of self-response options to the census. Presented with an English-language questionnaire, they may fail to return the form simply because they do not understand it; they may also elect not to call telephone numbers on the questionnaire to request a foreign language questionnaire. In 2000, 57.7 percent of linguistically isolated households were enumerated in the census by mailing back a census form (this includes specially requested foreign language questionnaires and interviews completed when a respondent called the telephone questionnaire assistance line); by comparison, 71.2 percent of non-linguistically isolated households responded by mailback. Thus, linguistically isolated households are more likely to require the more labor-intensive follow-up operations.

In addition, new immigrant households, like migrant households, may be unwilling or unable to provide complete household listings due to social and cultural concerns. They may harbor great fear and mistrust in the government and, with it, the census, or they may fear jeopardizing their immigration status, particularly if they perceive that the data could reveal income streams from other kin or housing violations. Depending on the norms of their origin countries, they may also have differing views as to whether it is culturally appropriate to report to census takers and other officials about infants and children in the home, as well as older household members.

Massey and Capoferro (2004:1079) also observe that “undocumented migrants often live in irregular housing and frequently sublet rooms or even floor space in homes and apartments registered in the names of others. Often these arrangements are illegal, which virtually guarantees that the unauthorized residents will be unreported.” Particularly vivid examples of the irregular and crowded residences held by migrant and immigrant families are found in the

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

Box 4-2

Colonias

Las colonias—using the Spanish term for neighborhood or community—are predominantly low-income residential areas on or near the U.S.-Mexico border that are notable for their lack of basic services such as electricity and water/sewer systems. All of the border states—California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas—have colonias, but they are most commonly associated with Texas, which has the highest number of these settlements. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas (1996) estimated that there are more than 1,400 colonias in Texas, housing over 400,000 people, and projects that an additional 700,000 people will need affordable housing along the Texas border by 2010—many of whom will gravitate toward colonia developments.

Colonias date back to at least the 1950s, when developers created unincorporated subdivisions in agriculturally barren land that—despite the lack of services—draw buyers due to the low cost. The population of the colonias is predominantly Hispanic, and unemployment rates range widely (from 20 to 80 percent, in one study) but are generally very high (Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, 1996:7). Housing stock includes “many homes, built without regard for indoor bathrooms or plumbing, [that] are rated as substandard or dilapidated by housing inspectors” (Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, 1996:11).

As part of the 2000 census research program, ethnographers conducted interviews in four colonias: two in Dona Ana County, New Mexico, one in El Paso County, Texas, and one in Riverside County, California (de la Puente and Stemper, 2003). (Riverside County does not directly border Mexico; under U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development standards, colonias can be defined in a 150-mile border region.) Their research suggested that the colonias concentrate and combine four major barriers to accurate enumeration:

  • Irregular housing stock: Ethnographers noted situations where owners of one-acre lots informally “subdivide” that lot and sell parts to family members who put trailers or campers on their spot. Only one address is associated with the lot, regardless of how many trailers may be there. They also observed small housing units nested within others, as well as housing unit “shelters” behind bushes or other physical obstacles.

  • Limited education and limited English knowledge: Three of the observed colonias were in update/leave areas (see Box 2-2), in which questionnaires were left at households by enumerators. These English-language forms were thus left with predominantly Spanish-speaking households. In their interviews, the researchers found that “none of the interviewees noticed the Spanish language message [to call an 800 telephone number] for assistance at the bottom of the first page” of the questionnaire; “because it lies at the end of a page written in English, we suspect most interviewees…overlook the message” (de la Puente and Stemper, 2003:9).

  • Concerns regarding confidentiality: Many colonia residents are undocumented or illegal immigrants, and hence may not be eager to participate in a government census or survey. Yet the ethnographers also noted a strong undercurrent of appreciation for the census; residents seemed to see participation in the count as a validation or empowerment process.

  • Complex and fluid households: Several of the colonias have large proportions of seasonal migrant workers.

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

colonias along the U.S.-Mexico border; see Box 4-2. (We return to the problems associated with unusual housing stock in Section 4–E.)

4–B.4
Issues Unique to Native Americans

Unique among racial and ethnic minority groups in the United States, American Indians and Alaska Natives have a distinct legal and political standing.15 Due to treaty obligations, tribal governments are essentially sovereign but dependent nations within the United States. In addition to the challenges associated with counting a population with demographic and family structures that differ from other groups in the nation, the legal standing of tribal governments creates basic logistical concerns for the census. Cooperation with tribal governments is necessary to generate accurate address listings and coordinate outreach activities and follow-up enumeration.

The accurate collection of information on native American ancestry is itself a complex topic—how well does the Census Bureau’s self-identification system square with legal status as American Indian (listing on tribal rolls) or cultural standards (e.g., participants in ongoing Indian society, whether living on American Indian reservations or not)? However, it is not one that is directly related to our charge; a previous National Research Council (2004a) report discusses race and ethnicity data collection in the census more generally.

Based on ethnographic observations from the 1990 and 2000 censuses, and extant demographic research, some of the issues that can complicate the meaning and measurement of residence among native Americans include the following:

  • Fundamental difference in “household” concept: Lujan (1990:10) observes that “the census schedule is founded on a western European image of how society is oriented” and its notions of residence are “based on the nuclear family household”; however, “most American Indian tribes and Alaska Native villages are based on the extended family concept and current residence patterns reflect this lifestyle.” American Indian “households” are likely to include more multigenerational kin and, consequently, larger and more extensive household rosters, as well as frequent mobility among the housing units on a reservation. Schwede (2003:xiv)

15

Indeed, though the historical review in Chapter 2 did not examine the topic in depth, American Indians have had a distinct standing in the census through most of American history. The Constitution directed that the population counts used for apportionment be calculated “excluding Indians not taxed.” As a result, American Indians were excluded in the 1790–1850 censuses. The 1860 census included coverage of “civilized Indians,” a definition based on land ownership. American Indians have been consistently counted in the census since 1890, though they were not included in apportionment counts from 1890 through 1940 (Lujan, 1990).

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

summarized ethnographic observation of Navajo and Inupiaq Indian respondents by noting that they tend to “not identify households in terms of shared physical structure [as the Census Bureau does], but rather on the basis of sharing of domestic functions such as earning and pooling income, cooperating in subsistence activities, cooking, child care, child raising, and other domestic tasks.”

Ethnographic observation of American Indians living in the San Francisco Bay area confirmed that household structures can be fluid in the community, with family members or fellow tribe members staying for times when they do not have any other place to go. Even though the off-reservation American Indian population, such as that in San Francisco, is geographically disperse, “certain ‘key’ households in the community are known for taking in those who need a place to stay. Oftentimes, these are the homes of female members of the community who serve maternal roles by providing shelter.” Hunter et al. (2003:7) concluded that these house guests—even if related—are highly unlikely to be reported as household members.

  • Resistance to or reluctance to federal government questioning: Given the long and difficult history of American Indian relations with the federal government, it is perhaps understandable that a reluctance to cooperate in federal activities like the census might linger. Extensive ethnographic observation of the urban Indians in St. Louis prior to the 1990 census (cited in Lujan, 1990) suggested that 23 percent of the Indian population interviewed signaled that they would not be inclined to answer the census, citing confidentiality concerns and general distrust of the government. Similar ethnographic study of the Colville Indians (cited in Lujan, 1990) had the same finding, suggesting more general reasons that the Indians would be reluctant to answer, including fear of exposure of housing regulation violations in federally subsidized tribal homes and reluctance to discuss cohabitation. As a result, American Indians were a major focus of the extensive outreach and advertising campaign of the 2000 census, including custom-themed posters and targeted activities carried out in partnership with tribal governments.

    Language differences: Lack of fluency in English can hinder a declining but still-existent small group of people whose primary language is a native tongue from participating in the census.

  • High mobility rates: Summarizing past work, Lujan (1990) divides reasons that have been associated with high mobility in the American Indian population into traditional and contemporary influences: Traditional influences include active participation in native American culture, which can involve attendance at tribal celebrations and participation in

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

ceremonies. Contemporary influences include subsistence activities, reflecting stark economic conditions on many Indian reservations. In the absence of employment opportunities on the reservation, many residents seek jobs elsewhere. Since their efforts may still be contributing to the economic well-being of the family at the reservation, “enduring ties” may drive both the worker and family members to consider the family home as the “usual residence” even if the worker is away most of the time. Bonvillain (1989), in an ethnographic study of the St. Regis Mohawk tribe for the 1990 census, found that men of the tribe are in high demand by construction companies for their worksmanship. Hence, groups of men from the Mohawk tribe regularly set up temporary group households at their employment sites, returning to St. Regis when they could.

4–C
THE HOMELESS POPULATION

An examination of complex ties between people and residences is incomplete if it does not consider people with ties to no fixed residence in addition to those with ties to two or more residences. As a panel, we have not weighed recommendations on the exact manner by which the street homeless population should be counted, a group that also includes those making use of shelters and relief facilities like soup kitchens. However, we do briefly comment on the nature of homelessness and the operations by which the census has tried to include them in the counts.

A basic question we have tried to answer for the various groups and living situations profiled in this report is the size of the population in question. But the basic question—“how many people are homeless in the United States?”—is very difficult to answer. Homelessness is not necessarily a permanent state; instead, people and families living in impoverished conditions experience homelessness on an episodic basis. Thus, a definition that considers homelessness strictly as a point-in-time phenomenon—portraying only a snapshot of “persons literally without a roof over their head, or forced to sleep in public or private shelters” at a single instance—is unduly restrictive and “seriously underestimates the level of homelessness in society” (Kusmer, 2002:4).16

Wright and Devine (1992b:212) summarized the measurement difficulties:

16

Indeed, some advocacy groups like the National Coalition for the Homeless oppose “the release of a separate ‘count’ of people enumerated in homeless situations (at selected service sites and identified outdoor locations) because such a number would be, by its very nature, both inaccurate and misleading, and therefore lead to uninformed decision-making by policymakers.” See “NCH’s Position on the Census and Homelessness” at http://www.nationalhomeless.org/publications/reports.html [8/1/06].

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

A moment’s reflection will make plain that ‘the total number of the homeless’ is of necessity a ‘soft,’ ambiguous number that probably cannot be known with a high degree of precision. …There [is] no shared or widely agreed-upon definition of just what constitutes a ‘homeless’ condition, and so different investigators are free to define the phenomenon in different ways. There is a large and obvious difference between the number literally homeless on any given night (a point prevalence rate), the number homeless at least once in the course of, say, a year (a period prevalence rate), or the number who become homeless during a given year (an annual incidence rate). No matter how inclusive the definition and how systematic the search, it is obvious that the homeless are a mobile, even nomadic, and certainly hard-to-locate group, and so the possibility is always open that large numbers of them have been missed in the counting effort. The above and a range of related factors imply that no study can provide a definitive count of the size of the homeless population. The best one can hope for is a more or less plausible count with known and small uncertainties attached to it.

“Public awareness of the ‘new homeless’ can be traced to the late 1970s,” notes Kusmer (2002:239), “when beggars and ‘street people’ became increasingly noticeable in the downtowns of many cities.” Homelessness continued to grow in prominence as a problem through the 1980s. In 1984 the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated that, on any given night, at least 250,000 people lived on the streets or in shelters. “By 1990, that figure had doubled. A 1996 Urban Institute survey estimated that on an average night 470,000 persons in the United States were sleeping in shelters but that a much larger number, close to 2 million, had experienced homelessness at some point during the previous year” (Kusmer, 2002:239). Contemporary estimates put the point prevalence rate of homelessness (the number literally homeless on a particular day) at on the order of 840,000 people; over the course of a year, it is suggested that at least 2.3 million, and perhaps as many as 3.5 million, experience a spell of homelessness (National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, 2004; Burt and Aron, 2000). Limited survey data suggest that episodes of homelessness average 5 months in length (National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, 2004:7).17

Very few survey measures have attempted to give a nationwide examination of homelessness. The most recent national-level study was conducted in 1996, when the Census Bureau was the contracted data collector for the National Survey of Homeless Assistance Providers and Clients (NSHAPC).18

17

See also “How Many People Experience Homelessness?,” Fact Sheet #2 published by the National Coalition for the Homeless, June 2005 version, posted at http://www.nationalhomeless.org [8/1/06].

18

See Burt and Aron (2000) and Burt (2001) for additional discussion of NSHAPC findings and Burt et al. (1999) for a full description of the survey’s design. Prior to the NSHAPC, the last

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

The NSHAPC included two separate surveys, one focused on administrators or representatives of programs providing services to the homeless and the other on the users or clients of those surveys. The surveys reached 6,300 program representatives and 4,200 users, respectively. Specific programs eligible for inclusion in the survey were emergency shelters, transitional housing, voucher distribution centers, food pantries, soup kitchens, mobile food programs, targeted outreach programs (including mental health care, alcohol/drug, and HIV/AIDS programs), and drop-in centers. The sample was constructed in a way that emphasized services in about 70 urban areas but also included a component of smaller cities and rural areas. However, given the survey’s focus on formal programs and agencies, the survey may have understated the level of rural homelessness since local governments and organizations may not have formally designated specific programs for the homeless. The completeness of the survey’s coverage of service-providing programs has also been criticized because the programs were surveyed in October 1996 while clients and users were surveyed in February; some services that may be open during winter months (February) may not be open in the fall (October).

The 1940 census was the first to use rules for nontypical residences, designating a specific Transient Night (T-Night) for the enumeration of the population that could be found at hotels, tourist or trailer camps, missions, flophouses, and other such places. More recently, the 1980 census did not include any program to count people at street locations. Instead, it mounted a “Mission Night” operation to canvass people at shelters, low-cost hotels and motels, and local jails, followed in the summer of 1980 by a daytime “casual count” operation in some cities around employment and welfare offices and select other locations.

The 1990 census mounted a more prominent effort to count segments of the homeless population through the institution of the S-Night (Shelter and Street Night) operation; see Box 4-3. “The intent (or perhaps the hope) [of S-Night] was that the shelter, street, and abandoned building enumerations would yield a fairly complete, accurate, and reliable point prevalence estimate of the number of homeless in the U.S.” (Wright and Devine, 1992b:213). However, the Census Bureau avoided casting S-Night tallies as a comprehensive count of the homelessness; moreover, Cordray and Pion (1991:595) argued that the Bureau “studiously avoided providing any definition of homelessness” and “skirted the issue by simply designating locations where and time when persons would be counted.”19

nationwide survey directly focused on the homeless was commissioned by the Urban Institute in 1987 (Burt and Cohen, 1989), the source of the estimate of roughly 500,000 persons experiencing homeless on any given day that gained some general acceptance over the 1990s.

19

Cordray and Pion (1991:595) cited Taeuber and Siegel (1991) as saying that the 1990 census did not impose a definition, but noted in fairness that no agreed-upon definition exists and that “some would suggest that there is little merit in arriving at a definition of homelessness.”

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

Box 4-3

S-Night

Methods for 1990 Census Shelter and Street Night (S-Night)

  • Local governments were asked to identify places where homeless people live and congregate, including street locations, shelters, abandoned buildings, inexpensive hotels and motels (e.g., “flophouses”), and bus and train stations.

  • Phase 1: Enumerators canvassed shelters and inexpensive hotels and motels between 6:00 p.m. and midnight on March 20, 1990.

  • Phase 2: Enumerators canvassed street locations, parks, all-night restaurants, and other locations between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. on March 21, 1990; abandoned buildings were observed between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m. in some cities.

  • Supplemental sites were visited on March 21 and 22, 1990.

  • Results: 34,000 sites were canvassed, tallying 178,000 people at shelters and 49,000 at street locations.

SOURCES: Citro (2000); McNally (2002); U.S. General Accounting Office (2003).

Despite the Census Bureau’s efforts, “the S-Night operation attracted considerable media attention and was controversial because the results were viewed as an undercount of the homeless” (Citro, 2000:206). S-Night was the focus of a special issue of Evaluation Review (Wright and Devine, 1992a; Edin, 1992; Hopper, 1992; Cousineau and Ward, 1992; Stark, 1992; Devine and Wright, 1992; Martin, 1992). Researchers conducted evaluations of S-Night procedures for five U.S. cities, using observers to watch the S-Night enumerators at work and, in at least one case, deliberately “planting” several ostensibly homeless people at eligible sites to see if they were captured in the enumeration or not.

The 1990 S-Night also occasioned a lawsuit by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the cities of Baltimore and San Francisco, and 11 individuals. “On September 15, 1994, the District Court rules in favor of the Census Bureau, stating that the agency’s alleged failure to count large numbers of homeless persons did not constitute a violation of its constitutional duty to conduct the decennial census, since individuals do not have a ‘right’ to be counted” (Bureau of the Census, 1995:1–43). On August 9, 1996, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld the lower court’s ruling, albeit for different reasons; the appeals court concluded that the plaintiffs had not demonstrated direct harm as a result of the Census Bureau’s procedures for counting the homeless, and hence rejected the case because the plaintiffs lacked standing (National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty v. Kantor, 94–5312).20

20

“In short, we cannot determine—indeed we have no idea—what effect any methodology for counting the homeless would have on the federal funding of any particular appellant recipient,”

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

Box 4-4

Service-Based Enumeration

Methods for 2000 Service-Based Enumeration (SBE) Program

  • During 1999, local governments and community-based organizations were asked to identify service locations anticipated to be open at census time.

  • Eligible locations were shelters (including emergency and short-term shelters, as well as transitional shelters where clients can stay up to 2 years); some hotels and motels; soup kitchens; mobile food van stops; and selected outdoor locations.

  • Census field staff visited SBE locations several weeks prior to enumeration to verify and update information.

  • Phase 1: Enumerators canvassed shelters on evening of March 27, 2000; respondents were asked to complete Individual Census Reports (see Box 3-1); the long form was administered to every sixth person.

  • Phase 2: Enumerators canvassed soup kitchens and mobile food van stops during daytime hours on March 28, 2000; soup kitchens were visited during the meal serving the largest number of clients; interviews were conducted using a modified census questionnaire, including a request for usual home elsewhere (UHE) information; only soup kitchen clients were eligible for the long-form questionnaire.

  • Phase 3: Enumerators visited selected outdoor locations during early morning hours of March 29, 2000; enumerators were accompanied by contact person/“gatekeeper” identified through local partnerships; interviews were conducted using Individual Census Reports and treated as group quarters.

  • People who returned “Be Counted” forms who specified “no address on April 1, 2000” were counted as part of SBE population.

  • Enumerator failure to record a group quarters identification code on returned questionnaires resulted in some SBE questionnaires being excluded from data capture and processing; the number of questionnaires so affected has not been specified by the Census Bureau.

  • Results: 14,817 sites were visited (51 percent of these were shelters), tallying 258,728 people. Soup kitchen and mobile food van respondents were permitted to claim a UHE; of the 71,632 person records collected from those sites, 24,846 were successfully geocoded to a housing unit, and 9,618 were subsequently chosen by the Bureau’s Primary Selection Unit as the actual household location.

  • The Bureau intended to use facility usage data from the preenumeration visit to adjust data for emergency and transitional shelters to account for those people who regularly use the facility but not specifically on the night of March 27. However, concerns with the resulting data quality led the Bureau to abandon separate tabulations of shelters as a category in initial summary files; the shelter data were later released in tract-level summaries and analyzed by Smith and Smith (2001).

SOURCES: Citro (2000); McNally (2002); U.S. General Accounting Office (2003).

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

For 2000, components of the former S-Night program were reformed into a new multistage operation termed service-based enumeration (SBE); see Box 4-4. Various components were covered through large deployment of enumerators on different nights around Census Day—shelters first, then soup kitchens and selected outdoor locations identified by local officials and community groups. Rule 17 of the 2000 census residence rules—consistent with 1990 practice—directed that people “at a soup kitchen or outreach program (e.g., mobile food van)” be permitted to indicate a usual home elsewhere. If no such home could be specified for a person, they were to be counted at the facility as if they reside there—even if the facility offers no beds or, by definition, people are legally barred from actually lodging in the facility (as is true for soup kitchens). The Bureau also mounted a T-Night operation on March 31, 2000, interviewing people at migrant work camps, campgrounds, fairs and carnivals, and marinas; people counted at these locations were permitted to report a usual home elsewhere.

4–D
PEOPLE MISSED BY CENSUS QUESTIONS AND OPERATIONS

4–D.1
Census Day Movers

Throughout history, Americans have never been known for their propensity to stay put in one place for a long time. Rather, the nation is one that is constantly on the move; as of the mid-1990s, it was estimated that 17 percent of the population move their residence at least once a year (Hunter et al., 2003:1). People move for many reasons, including the loss of a job or a transfer within the same company, the formation or dissolution of marriages or partnerships, or simply the search for new opportunities and new settings.

Conceptual problems—for both the person answering the questionnaire and for the Census Bureau in processing the results—arise for people who move residences on or around Census Day. This includes people reached at a current address for whom a move is imminent, people who have just moved to a new location, and people who are in the midst of a move (perhaps temporarily staying in a hotel or with friends or family). The major conceptual question posed by movers is whether a “usual residence” can be defined prospectively (as the place where the person expects to spend most of the time) or must be defined retrospectively. The 2000 census marketing campaign emphasized the impact of census data on the placement of such services as fire stations and health care facilities; to the extent that these themes resonate with the public, census respondents may be more inclined to think of themselves as counting at the new location even if they have not yet actually lived there.

noted the court; nor could the court find evidence that possible undercount of the homeless diluted the vote of areas with large homeless populations.

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

The conceptual challenges of defining residence among movers overlap with operational concerns:

  • Could the timing of the census mailing—or, for that matter, the placement of Census Day itself on the first day of a calendar month— exacerbate difficulties in response (e.g., if there is a strong tendency for new apartment leases or the like to start at the beginning of a month)?

  • What becomes of census questionnaires that arrive at recently vacated units, and how good will proxy data from neighbors or landlords (collected in follow-up activities) be? Should forwarding or other information about the departed household residents be gathered?

  • How different are the households that occupy a unit before and after the move? In particular, the accuracy of matching makes the treatment of movers a major concern when comparing census returns with independent measures from postenumeration surveys, such as the 2000 Accuracy and Coverage Evaluation.

Work that has been done on the general timing of moves suggests that the March–May time frame of peak census activity is the beginning—but not the peak—of the basic “moving season.” Schachter and Kuenzi (2002) analyzed data from a migration history module conducted as part of the 1996 panel of the SIPP. The module (administered between June and September 1996), included questions on the month and year respondents moved to both their current residence and their immediately previous residence; by subtraction, the data also provide insight on duration of stay at the previous residence. Peak moving activity occurs in the summer months of June, July, and August: those 3 months accounted for one-third of all recorded moves in the data set. The months central to decennial census questionnaire mailout—March and April—are periods where moving activity begins to escalate from the low-move-activity winter months.

Neither the 2000 census nor its past few predecessors defined formal residence rules for the handling of movers; technical documentation for data files for the 2000 census note only that “people who moved around Census Day were counted at the place they considered to be their usual residence” (U.S. Census Bureau, 2001:C-2). However, some census operations have explicitly tried to determine how well movers are handled. Lowry (1987:7–9) describes a limited check on movers that was conducted during the 1970 census; Census Bureau staff were allowed to examine change-of-address cards filed with local post offices in parts of 17 metropolitan areas. If the two addresses were in the same census district, enumerators were deployed to see if the person or family had been counted at one of the addresses. The operation suggested that many movers “escaped enumeration; presumably both their previous and prospective dwellings were reported as vacant.” Bureau analysts concluded that if the

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

operation were “conducted nationally and (carefully) it would have added 0.2 to 0.7 percent to the 1970 population count.”

In 2000, enumerator questionnaires (those used in nonresponse follow-up and coverage improvement follow-up) asked whether the respondent lived at the housing unit on Census Day or whether he or she moved in after April 1. If they moved in after Census Day, a card instructed the enumerator to complete up to two questionnaires at the unit:

  • The current resident was asked, “Did you, or anyone else in your household, complete a census questionnaire from your previous address?” If yes, the enumerator was told to “thank the person and do nothing further.” If no, or the person did not know, the enumerator was to conduct a census interview on a fresh questionnaire, writing in the person’s previous address.

  • The enumerator was told to determine the housing unit’s status as of Census Day. If it was occupied by a different household, a “knowledgeable respondent,” such as a neighbor, was to be contacted, and “as much information…as possible for the Census Day residents” was to be entered on the questionnaire for the unit.

The Census Bureau’s evaluation of this “mover probe” procedure (Keathley, 2003) indicated that 22,850 households would not have been included in the census if not for the probe—a small number relative to the 105 million occupied housing units measured in the census, but also a small part (0.05 percent) of the total follow-up load. Operational evidence suggested that the probe might not have been well explained to enumerators, which could be improved by computerizing the follow-up interviews in 2010. The operation suffered from the severe limitation that information on both the pre- and postmove addresses were not gathered or linked in any sense, sharply limiting analysis that could be done on the characteristics of movers.

4–D.2
Census Day Births and Deaths

Just as moves of residence on and around Census Day can create counting complications, so too can much more drastic changes in status: births and deaths. Table 4-5 illustrates vital statistics data on births and deaths by month for the year 2004. Deaths historically show some seasonal effect, increasing somewhat during the winter months; the peak census months of March and April are at the end of the seasonal escalation.

No formal residence rule was defined for births or deaths on Census Day, nor were they explicitly included in the questionnaire or enumerator instructions for the most recent censuses. Early census enumerator instructions treated the question matter-of-factly; the first set of instructions, accompanying the 1820 census, directed that (Gauthier, 2002:6):

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

Table 4-5 Births and Deaths in the United States by Month, 2004, Provisional Vital Statistics Data

Month

Births

Deaths

Number

Rate per 1,000 population

Number

Rate per 1,000 population

January

334,000

13.5

236,000

9.5

February

317,000

13.7

203,000

8.8

March

347,000

14.0

212,000

8.5

April

334,000

13.9

197,000

8.2

May

339,000

13.6

195,000

7.9

June

346,000

14.4

187,000

7.8

July

360,000

14.5

191,000

7.7

August

357,000

14.3

189,000

7.6

September

357,000

14.8

185,000

7.7

October

350,000

14.0

195,000

7.8

November

337,000

13.9

192,000

7.9

December

345,000

13.8

211,000

8.4

SOURCE: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2005). “Births, Marriages, Divorces, and Deaths: Provisional Data for 2004.” National Vital Statistics Reports 53(21): Table B. Originally published June 28; updated October 18.

[marshals] are to insert in their returns all the persons belonging to the family on [Census Day], even those who may be deceased at the time when they take the account; and, on the other hand, that they will not include in it, infants born after that day. This, though not prescribed in express terms by the act, is the undoubted intention of the legislature, as manifested by the clause, providing that every person shall be recorded as of the family in which he or she shall reside on [Census Day].

By 1940, instructions strove to be more specific—enumerators were to count people living as of 12:01 a.m. on Census Day. Babies born after 12:01 a.m. should not be counted, but people dying after 12:01 a.m. should. This instruction was repeated in 1960 (1950 had a simpler “count people living on Census Day” instruction). The 1970–1990 censuses did not explicitly give directions, but the Bureau’s implied suggestion was to count anyone alive at any time on Census Day.

The three phenomena described thus far in this section—moves, births, and deaths around Census Day—can create complications for enumeration and household rostering based on the timing of the interviews. In particular, the more time passes between the administration of the census questionnaire and follow-up operations (e.g., enumerator contact in the case of large households with more than seven members or the postenumeration survey used for coverage evaluation), the more such changes may create problems in match-

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

ing. In Section 6–F, we discuss a particular flaw in current census operations where moves, births, and deaths may cause problems. The flaw is the designation of April 1 as Census Day at the same time that the letter accompanying the census forms (and other publicity) encourages respondents to complete and return the questionnaire before April 1.

4–D.3
Babies and Young Children

The accuracy with which the census counts children, and infants in particular, has been a point of concern for at least a century. Early census ledgers requested that enumerators list infants’ ages as fractions of a year, so that a 3-month-old would be listed as 3/12 and an 18-month-old as 16/12.21 However, the 1850 census volume (DeBow, 1853:iv) chided that, “in regard to ages the assistant marshals are often remiss with infants. They omit fractions, and show all to be of one year of age, instead of noting the parts of the year, etc. On this account some counties include no births within the year.” Young (1901:254) summarizes findings from the 1880 and 1890 censuses, in which “apparent deficiencies in census reports of children [were] caused by omissions in the enumeration and by overstatement of age.” The latter was judged to be “by far the more important”’ infants under 1 year old might be seem to be undercounted because parents might report them as being 1 year old, a practice that may have been encouraged by the 1890 census schedule’s use of “age at nearest birthday” rather than “age at last birthday” as the question heading. The 1940 and 1950 censuses tried to increase attention to this long-standing problem by requiring the completion of a separate infant card for “each child born during the 4 months from 12:01 a.m. December 1, 1939, to 12:01 a.m., April 1, 1940” (e.g., infants of less than 4 months).

More recently, West and Robinson (1999) analyzed 1990 census data, including results from independent demographic analysis estimates of the population, to confirm the undercount of children. They found that the undercount of children ages 0–17 was particularly concentrated among American Indian, Hispanic, and black households, and among households where the property is rented rather than owned.

West and Robinson (1999) argue that residence rule problems “may disproportionately affect children” because they are central to several household and living situations that make accurate rostering difficult. We have already discussed several of these situations—children living at boarding schools or colleges for part of the year, and children in foster care settings—in Chapter 3, and issues surrounding children in joint custody arrangements and

21

The 1860, 1880, and 1890 enumerator instructions directed that fractions only be used for children under 1 year of age and that children under 1 month be reported as 0/12. The 1900 and 1910 instructions directed that fractions be used for “child[ren] not 2 years old,” while the 1920 and 1930 census asked for fractional ages up until children “not 5 years old.”

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

cohabiting-couple households in this chapter. Generally, children may be raised in households that do not include either of their biological parents for a variety of reasons. Children may be raised in households maintained by their grandparents; West and Robinson (1999) cite research suggesting that as many as 2 million children lived in grandparent households in 1990. Depending on circumstances—such as the loss of parents or removal by incarceration— children may also be raised by other relatives or by family friends. To the extent that such arrangements are not “formalized”—e.g., the grandparents do not actually take legal custody of the children—it is possible that some respondents to a census or other questionnaire asking them to roster their households might not think it proper to include the children.

Census coverage errors among children may arise from respondent misunderstanding of (or resistance to) stated census residence rules, but there is reason to suspect that a more basic, structural feature of the census questionnaire itself plays some part. In 2000, the census questionnaire allowed for detailed entry of data for six people, with space to list only the names of six additional people. These large households were intended to be automatic cases for the coverage edit follow-up operation, but if the household could not be contacted during follow-up, the exact nature of persons 7–12 in the household—and certainly any information in households with 13 or more— would be unknown.

The reason that this structural feature may affect the counting of children is that listing people in descending age order may be a natural approach for the adult responding to the census form. Indeed, this type of ordering was explicitly instructed during the enumerator-contact era from 1850 through 1960.22 Likewise, a respondent may intuitively reverse-sort people in the roster by the degree to which they “belong” in the household; in cases where extended families and multiple generations live in the same structure, children of kin may simply fall lower in the respondent’s mental ordering of people in the household. Hence, they may fall in the section where only names are recorded, or not at all if no space is left. Using 1998 data from the Current Population Survey, O’Hare (1999:8) suggested that 5.6 million children lived in households of seven or more people; to the extent that age ordering is used in answering the census form, these children would be at risk of being missed in the census.

4–E
AMBIGUITY DUE TO HOUSING STOCK ISSUES

The “Be Counted” program of the 2000 census placed blank questionnaires in public places so that people who believed that they had not been

22

Per the 1850 enumerator instructions, “the names are to be written, beginning with the father and mother [or other adult head of family]; to be followed, as far as practicable, with the name of the oldest child residing at home, then the next oldest, and so on to the youngest, then the other inmates, lodgers and borders, laborers, domestics, and servants.”

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

reached by the census could return a questionnaire; the program expanded on the similar “Were You Counted?” program of the 1960–1990 censuses.23 These programs resulted in the addition of thousands of people to the census—71,000 in 1980 (from 62,000 returned forms) and 260,000 in 1990 (on 352,800 forms). For the 2000 census, the Census Bureau printed over 16 million “Be Counted” forms, about 74 percent in English and the remainder in five different languages; 804,939 were returned, eventually resulting in the addition of 560,880 people (Carter, 2002:iii, 1).24

Though the raw counts of persons added to the census by these self-report programs is small relative to the population as a whole, the programs are important because they are the exception to an otherwise strict rule: the only way in which any information—good or bad—can be obtained from respondents is if they are reached by a census questionnaire, delivered in the mail or by an enumerator. In a mail- and address-based census, this can only happen if the housing stock occupied by people is known and reachable; this is not always the case.

As America’s urban centers grew in size, and a larger share of the populace lived in cities rather than in rural areas, census officials became aware of an increasing variety of places and shelters where people and families settled. The Census Bureau’s official definition of what constitutes a “housing unit” has shifted with time, as shown in Table 4-6, as has guidance on hard-to-determine housing locations. Enumerator instructions for the 1860 census warned that “very many persons, especially in cities, have no other place of abode than stores, shops, etc.”—that is, “places which are not primarily intended for habitation.” Upon contact by the enumerator, “such buildings will be reckoned as dwelling houses within the intention of the census law” and persons who actually live in them were to be counted there.25 Officials of the 1880 census considered an even broader array of unusual housing types:

By individuals living out of families is meant all persons occupying lofts in public buildings, above stores, warehouses, factories, and stables, having no other usual place of abode; persons living solitary in cabins, huts, or tents; persons sleeping on river boats, canal boats, barges, etc., having no other usual place of abode, and persons in police stations having no homes. Of the classes just mentioned, the most important, numerically, is the first, viz.: those persons, chiefly in cities, who occupy rooms in

23

In addition to circulating forms to mayors’ offices, the 1970 census took the step of having the “Were You Counted?” form printed in several large newspapers; “the reader was urged to fill in this form and send it to the census district office if he believed that he or members of his household had been missed in the enumeration” (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1970:5-32).

24

Carter (2002:28) concludes that about 15,410 of the returned “Be Counted” forms “were determined to be persons with no usual residence.”

25

However, watchmen or other staff who sometimes “sleep in such store or shop merely for purposes of security” but maintain a home elsewhere in the city were to be counted with their families.

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

Table 4-6 Criteria for Distinguishing Separate Units in Multi-Unit Dwellings, 1850–2000

Census

Housing Unit Criteria

1850

Living together in a house, or part of a house, upon one common means of support and separately from others in similar circumstances

1860

Living together in a house, or part of a house, upon one common means of support and separately from others in similar circumstances; institutions may be broken into multiple units if there are several tenements or distinct households

1870

Living together under one roof and provided for at a common table

1880–1890

Common roof and table; in “tenement houses and the so-called ‘flats’ of the great cities,” households distinguished by separate tables

1900

“Best test” is number of separate tables; each unit “usually, though not always, has its own meals”

1910–1930

Separate portions of the dwellings house and housekeeping entirely separate

1940

Separate portion of house and separate cooking or housekeeping facilities

1950

Room with separate cooking equipment or two or more rooms with direct access to a common hallway

1960

Live and eat separately from others and direct access to a common hall or cooking equipment

1970

Live and eat separately from others and direct access to a common hall or complete kitchen facilities (the rules were not strictly enforced)

1980

Live and eat separately from others and direct access to common hall (the rules were not strictly enforced)

1990

Live and eat separately from others and direct access to common hall

2000

Live separately from others and direct access to common hall

SOURCE: Ruggles and Brower (2003:Table 2); Ruggles (2003:Note 2).

public buildings, or above stores, warehouses, factories and stables. In order to reach such persons, the enumerator will need not only to keep his eyes open to all indications of such casual residence in his enumeration district, but to make inquiry both of the parties occupying the business portion of such buildings and also of the police.

The 1880 administrators announced that they would issue letters “to the mayor[s] of every large city of the United States, requesting the cooperation of the police, so far as it may be necessary to prevent the omission of the classes of persons herein indicated.” The 1890 enumerator instructions used similar language, though no letters to mayors or police were offered; however, new residence patterns—“tenement houses and the so-called ‘flats’ of the great cities”—were added to the roster of special cases.26

26

Interpreting eating as a key sign of usual residence, the 1890 instructions directed that “as many families are to be recorded” in these places “as there are separate tables.”

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

As Ericksen (2000:207) summarizes, “whole-household omissions” are easy to understand conceptually; they occur when an entire housing unit is left off the Master Address File and, hence, does not receive a questionnaire. However:

Some housing units are missed because no one finds the building. Others are missed because they are located in structures that appear to contain only one residence but actually contain several. For instance, a three-story house, originally built for one family, is converted into apartments. From the outside, the census-taker sees only one door and one mailbox, and he or she does not search for nor find the extra housing units to update the mailing list. …Housing units for the very poor can be be hard to find. Old apartment buildings, often located in high-crime areas, may not have separate mailboxes or identifiable numbers for the individual apartments. Many very poor people, frequently undocumented aliens, live in places like garages and tents located in the backyards of friends or relatives. Their addresses are not listed and they are not counted.

In the balance of this chapter we briefly consider two special cases where the nature of housing stock precludes an easy determination of residence.

4–E.1
Hotels and Motels

The earliest census enumerator instructions recognized the need to account for the population found in inns and other public houses. Through the 19th century, public houses and hotels tended to be places where people spent relatively long stretches of time; the concept of the hotel as a primarily short-term and transient residential location is a more modern one, particularly spurred on by the emergence of motor lodges or motels in the mid-20th century. The enumerator instructions for the 1900 census were the first to acknowledge the temporary, “transient guests of a hotel”; these “are not to be enumerated as of the hotel, unless they are likely otherwise to be omitted from the enumeration.” Instead, only boarders or employees “who regularly sleep” at the hotel (including the owner) were to be counted at the hotel.

The 1930 enumerator instructions acknowledged the basic problem of hotel housing stock: “the distinction between an apartment house and an apartment hotel, and in turn between an apartment hotel and a hotel devoted mainly to transients, will often be difficult to establish.” Having laid out the basic challenge, though, the instructions prescribed a rather confusing rule:

All of the persons returned from a hotel should likewise be counted as a single “family,” except that where a family of two or more members (as a husband and wife, or a mother and daughter) occupies permanent quarters in a hotel (or an apartment hotel), it should be returned separately, leaving the “hotel family” made up principally of individuals having no other family relations.

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

The 1960 census—the last “traditional” personal-visit census—included hotels as one of the “special places” to be addressed by special enumeration techniques. Under the definition of “housing unit” established for that census (see Table 4-6), persons residing in an apartment hotel would be counted as separate units, so long as they have access to a common hallway (Ruggles and Brower, 2003:80).

Since that time, the exact manner in which hotels and motels have been included in (or excluded from) the census is uncertain. Among the most recent censuses, the 1980 census was the only one to attempt direct contact with temporary hotel guests; guests “on the night of March 31, 1980, were requested to fill out a census form for assignment of their census information back to their homes if they indicated that no one was at home to report them in the census” (Bureau of the Census, 1982:C-1). Instead, the 1990 and 2000 censuses left hotels and motels as an ambiguous case—not explicitly covered in the household population, not directly considered part of the group quarters population, and only partly included in the shelter-based population. In 1990, the Bureau did include occupied hotel and motel rooms in its definition of “housing unit,” when occupied by permanent residents: that is, persons who consider the hotel as their usual place of residence and have no usual place of residence elsewhere. In addition, some hotels and motels were counted as part of the “emergency shelters for homeless persons” category to be counted in the S-Night operation, specifically, those charging less than $12 a night and those used entirely or dedicated in part to homeless people).27 The 2000 census included no attempt to count persons living in hotels or motels, and no mention of hotels is made in the 31 residence rules for the 2000 census.

Several challenges are posed by hotels and motels for definition of residence:

  • Proliferation of extended-stay hotels: Over the past two decades, extended-stay suite hotels have become a larger share of the hotel market. They have become options for people whose employment sends them to another site for weeks or months, and the hotel-type arrangement may be more attractive and less burdensome than solutions like short-term or month-to-month apartment leases.

  • Poor fit with either household or group quarters listing, and with household or group quarters enumeration procedures: Hotel rooms are a gray area in

27

These single room occupancy (SRO) hotels, also described as “flophouses,” tend to “offer individual, sparsely furnished rooms, with limited cooking facilities and communal bathrooms”; they “have traditionally offered housing to the poor elderly, the low-income single working population, the mentally handicapped, and alcohol and narcotic addicts” (Rollinson, 1990:47). Though the overall stock of SRO housing in the United States is believed to be declining, sizable pockets remain in some large cities; a canvass of such facilities in San Francisco found over 450 families and 760 children living in SROs (Citywide Families in SROs Collaborative, 2001).

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

terms of potential coverage on Census Bureau address lists. Given that some hotel rooms (particularly extended-stay options) can effectively serve as short- to long-term leased apartments, an argument could be made for their inclusion as potential housing units. That said, hotel stays are much more often short term in nature. Given the highly transitory nature of most of the hotel population, and that the U.S. census remains a de jure rather than de facto count, it could likewise be argued that special, broadly aimed efforts at enumerating the hotel population would be wasteful.

  • Embedded and associated housing units: As hinted in the 1900 enumerator instructions, hotels and motels can be deceptive in that actual full-time living situations may be overshadowed by the short-term transitory nature of guest stays. For instance, even the smallest motels may have owners or managers who live on-site; they should rightly be counted in the household population, but they may be missed entirely, depending on the quality of address updating systems. Likewise, it is certainly not unprecedented for hotels to become a full-time living arrangement (e.g., family members of owner/managers or conversion of hotels—in part or in full—to apartments or condominiums).28

4–E.2
People Dislocated by Disasters

The destruction caused by natural disasters—hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, fires—can disrupt the lives of thousands of people, forcing them to find shelter or alternate housing for weeks or months following the disaster. The decennial census has had to deal with the short-term dislocation impacts caused by major disasters: Hurricane Floyd (North Carolina, August 1999) in the 2000 census, the Loma Prieta earthquake (San Francisco Bay area, October 1989) in the 1990 census, and Hurricane Camille (Gulf Coast, August 1969) in the 1970 census among them. But the impact of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005—causing not only massive damage but the effective depopulation of New Orleans—has raised particular concern over major conceptual and logistical challenges, for the definition of residence and for basic data collection, that must be addressed by the decennial census (and the entire federal statistical system). This set of challenges is also set against the backdrop of the terrorist strikes of September 11, 2001, and the realization that major dislocation effects may arise from human-caused as well as natural disasters.

The 2000 census residence rules included no specific provision for counting people displaced by disasters. Under a general heading of “people away

28

A recent high-profile example is the landmark Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The hotel closed in April 2005 for conversion for mixed use; a smaller hotel component will still operate, with 150 rooms, but 200 condominium units will be carved out for occupancy.

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

from their usual residence on Census Day,” technical documentation for 2000 census data indicates that, “in some areas, natural disasters…displaced households from their usual place of residence. If these people reported a destroyed or damaged residence as their usual residence, they were counted at that location” (U.S. Census Bureau, 2001:C-3). How exactly this count was to be implemented was not made clear:

  • The closest analogue to the short-term facilities where disaster evacuees might be housed is the “emergency shelter” of rule 24 of the 2000 census residence rules—one for which reporting of a usual home elsewhere is disallowed.

  • The documentation suggests that the mechanism for counting people away from their usual residence was “by means of interviews with other members of their families, resident managers, or neighbors” (U.S. Census Bureau, 2001:C-3). However, the standard 2000 census questionnaire included no provision for reporting other address information for household members, and the instructions on the form direct respondents to include “people staying here on [Census Day] who have no other permanent place to stay” at this household (seemingly including disaster evacuees temporarily staying with family members). Reliance on neighbor reports in cases where whole neighborhoods are destroyed or displaced is also problematic.

Conceptually, the case of people dislocated by disasters raises the fundamental question of how much weight should be placed on intent in determining usual residence—in this case, on the intent to return to buildings that no longer exist or to housing units that are uninhabitable for the foreseeable future. In Chapter 2, we discussed various conflicting legal and social standards that underlie the meaning of residence. Displaced people face a particularly difficult set of tradeoffs because they must create some ties to their new community that otherwise could be considered evidence of permanent change— such as renting or leasing housing and enrolling children in local schools. At the same time, they are obliged to maintain ties to the disaster area—seeking federal disaster benefits and insurance settlements and paying taxes and land use fees. The Katrina example is particularly telling as the 2006 election season nears; Louisiana election officials plan to permit hurricane evacuees to vote and to allow votes specific to New Orleans offices and issues to be cast at multiple stations around the state. Proposed federal legislation would extend absentee voting to Katrina evacuees in both 2006 and 2008, on the same basis as military personnel stationed abroad, and would further require all states to publicize and promote this absentee voting.29

29

The legislation, the Displaced Voter Protection Act of 2005, would require displaced per

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
×

Logistically, people displaced by disasters raises yet another set of basic questions. Through partnership with federal authorities and private charities, can displaced people be contacted—either in the census, if the disaster occurs close to Census Day, or in ongoing collections like the ACS or CPS? Barring that, can an up-to-date inventory of the destroyed (and rebuilding) housing stock be maintained, and the population in temporary shelters be accurately logged and followed up as they move to more permanent homes?

sons to “submit an affidavit stating that the individual intends to return to the place of residence where the individual is otherwise qualified to vote.” The act was introduced separately in the House and Senate as H.R. 3734 and S. 1867, respectively, and has also been incorporated into an omnibus relief bill, H.R. 4197. As of May 2006, all of the bills had not advanced beyond committee consideration (the omnibus H.R. 4197 having been referred to 9 separate committees).

Suggested Citation:"4 Complex and Ambiguous Living Situations." National Research Council. 2006. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11727.
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The usefulness of the U.S. decennial census depends critically on the accuracy with which individual people are counted in specific housing units, at precise geographic locations. The 2000 and other recent censuses have relied on a set of residence rules to craft instructions on the census questionnaire in order to guide respondents to identify their correct "usual residence." Determining the proper place to count such groups as college students, prisoners, and military personnel has always been complicated and controversial; major societal trends such as placement of children in shared custody arrangements and the prevalence of "snowbird" and "sunbird" populations who regularly move to favorable climates further make it difficult to specify ties to one household and one place. Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place reviews the evolution of current residence rules and the way residence concepts are presented to respondents. It proposes major changes to the basic approach of collecting residence information and suggests a program of research to improve the 2010 and future censuses.

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