Terence H Hull

From 2020:

Over a long and eclectic demographic career, issues surrounding census data quality have been at the centre of my research.

In my retirement I have been following censuses in Indonesia, Australia and the United States, the countries of my closest involvement. While the digital age promised greater ease of collection of population data, each of these countries has stumbled in the first two decades of the 21st Century.

Indonesia initiated an ambitious plan to collect 2020 census data in two phases. First online between February and April with a self-administered questionnaire. Nearly 55 million people were enumerated this way. Then in July face to face interviews were carried out to cover the rest of the estimated total population of 275 million people. Covid-19 threw a spanner in the works. Many of the interviewers failed to visit homes. Instead they copied information held by local government officials. This could severely undermine the census coverage across the sprawling archipelago.

Australia also struggled with online enumerations. Just last week the Canberra Times asked “Could the ABS be headed for census fail 2.0?” The Auditor-General found a failure to fully implement the recommendations from the review of the 2016 census-night meltdown. The newspaper should have noted that the collapse of the website on the “census night” was partially due to unrealistic expectations raised in the public mind that everybody should log in to be counted on the same evening. Never in the history of censuses has that been possible. Censuses take weeks or even months to collect.

The 2020 United States census has been disrupted by the twin storms of political conflict and Covid-19. This vital tool of democracy was harnessed by the Trump administration to undermine democratic principles. There is likely to be a severe miscount revealed when the results emerge next year.

For me personally the most interesting US census product in 2022 will be the release of the 1950 US enumeration following the 72-year embargo. I will be able to see the family record when I was 3 years old. Aside from the value of such information for genealogy individual records also spur sociological and historical research. Such information is not available in Australia, where individual records have been accidentally or systematically destroyed for 150 years.