Word: census
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Ever since William the Conqueror compiled the Domesday Book in eleventh century England, census officals have had to face the fact that they cannot possibly include everyone in a national roll call. The problem has continued through the ages up to today, as current government people-counters realize that the U.S. Census Bureau's decennial national head-count is in no way completely accurate...
...method developed recently by members of the Harvard Statistics Department may make the American census, in which officials estimate more than 1.4 percent of the 1980 population was either most or undercounted, a more exact process, and in doing so, these researchers may affect the way congressional disticts are determined and the process by which federal funds for social services are allocated...
...builds on the idea of the capture-recapture" statistical technique, Donald B. Rubin, chairman of the Statistics Department, says of his census modification technique. Rubin explains the new procedure as similar to the method biology researchers use to study bird and animal populations. "It's like tagging fish in a pond, releasing them, and catching them again to see how the population has changed," he says...
Members of the Statistics Department, who have been working on this project for more than a year, propose selecting population segments of 300,000 homes in various regions across the country and then intensively studying their group dynamics after a normal U.S. census is taken by mail, said Rubin, who has been at Harvard for four years. The scientists, who include Rubin, Assistant Professor of Statistics Hal Stern and four graduate students, then use the results from these segmented studies to adjust the census' total population count...
...would take the information from the census, which people mail in regarding numbers [of persons living] in houses, and would then send people to the same houses to take a new, more exact count. Then we would compare the two counts and arrive at a different adjustment factor for each population block--such as Black males or white, elderly women. By applying those numbers to national statistics, we would adjust for the names missed in the national mailing," says Rubin, who has worked with the Census Bureau on statistical problems several times over the last 10 years...