Govt Survey: "Your Response is Required by Law"

[Lloyd Danforth]

I threw the 2000 census form out.  I doubt if they got many returns from the neighborhood I left since then, although they tried to 'sell' it by threatening loss of fed money for all of the programs many in the city were on.

[John Edward Mercier]

Oh My God, you mean if I don't fill out the unnecessary for the original function of the census questions...
that the Federal government will stop controlling me through unnecessary programs, and such.

[John Edward Mercier]

      

[grasshopper]

  About 10 years ago, I was hung over BAD, still puking but on furlo for a 20 min respite, and a poor Irish Redheaded immigrant came to the house.  I was in my underwear and I answered the door smelling like a fucking brew house with vomit and I answered her questions.  It was in October and it was kind of shitty out.  Don't you know the poor skinny woman was hitting on me!
\   Hell, after she left, I threw up outside, went to my room and almost puked on my poor Chow chow who was (can you believe it) trying to avoid me like the plauge.  It was a nice interview if I say so myself, also, it was the last time I had peppermint Schnaps!

[Russell Kanning]

Does anyone here know how much trouble I could get in for not filling this out? I haven't done any real civil disobedience thus far, but the Census Bureau isn't notorious the way IRS, DEA, and BATFE are.

I have always thrown them away.

[Tom Sawyer]

I have never filled out their stinkin' form.

[Russell Kanning]

and they get skewed stats ... only certain people will fill out the forms

[Pat McCotter]

Yep, only those who want government interference assistance in their lives fill them out.

[John Edward Mercier]

I don't think the government really cares...
Its more a participatory function... the fewer that participate the better as far as its concerned.

[Pat McCotter]

I was just reading an article on this survey and the problem of declining reponses. See the bold items below about the (cue dramatic music) "alternative."

Privacy Concerns and the Uncertain Future of Statistical Data
Kenneth Prewitt
Fall 2005

I recently wrote an essay for Science titled "What if We Give a Census and No One Comes?" With this quirky title, I wanted to draw attention to the decline in public cooperation with government surveys, similar if less drastic to the declining response rates in commercial and academic surveys. The census itself is mandatory and presumably immune to non-response. But three troubling trends have been documented for the 2000 census—each of which we can trace to the noisy privacy debate that erupted when the long form reached America's households. The debate contributed to a census mail-back rate approximately five percent lower than it would have been in the absence of the attack on the long form. The differential rate at which the short and long form were mailed back was nine percent, nearly double what it had been in 1990. Item non-response reached unprecedented levels. On even such an innocuous question as how many rooms do you have in this house, skipped by less than a half percent in 1990, six percent did not give an answer in 2000. In the 1990 census, a negligible percent of the public (1.3%) refused to say how much they paid in rent; nearly 16% left that question blank in 2000. On the always troubling income question, item non-response doubled between 1990 and 2000 (from 10% to 20%). To a question on real estate taxes, one-third of the households gave no answer.

The census was a target of conservative talk show hosts; late night comics added their cynical voice; national political leaders weighed in. The then-presidential candidate, George Bush, said if he got the long form he was not so sure he would answer it. The Senate majority leader suggested that Americans not answer census questions if they found them "to be intrusive." Six bills were introduced (none passed) that would have given legal standing to non-compliance with what, in prior law, the Congress had declared mandatory.

The debate was not about confidentiality. It was about intrusiveness, a more recent dimension of privacy concerns. Confidentiality is about inappropriate data sharing. Privacy, as I'll use the term here, is about the government's right to ask the question in the first place. Think of it as the difference between "don't tell anyone what I told you" and "don't ask; it's none of your business. " The difference is reflected in separate Principles recently announced by the Census Bureau. A Confidentiality Principle reiterates the long-standing pledge (vigorously honored) to keep responses confidential. A Privacy Principle is new. It pledges that the nation's premier statistical agency will ease off when respondents view government's questions as intrusive and insist on being left alone.

As we know it today, the national statistical system is millions upon millions of citizens voluntarily checking boxes, completing forms, and answering questions. But government surveys will increasingly encounter a public saying "leave me alone" (assuming the survey can get past the instinct to pitch "junk mail" as well as privacy-protecting devices such as doormen, gated communities, and call-blocking). What, then, happens to the national statistical system—and to the policymaking and evaluation that relies on it? Something will replace it. The government (and the economy) cannot function without the dense data collection system now housed in 70 federal statistical programs and agencies, at a cost of a half-billion dollars annually. If this survey-based system is vulnerable to non-compliance and huge cost increases due to growing privacy concerns, an alternative will be found.

This alternative "statistical system" will draw much more heavily on administrative data than at present. And it will incorporate commercially collected information. Consider the 2000 long form questions. Does the census have to ask an income question if the IRS already has the information, or about home mortgages if a bank or credit service can supply it, or about distance driven to work if the government can easily link home address, place of employment and EasyPass records? The vast amount of data pouring into various digital systems, the powerful data mining algorithms available, and the new high-tech data collection possibilities (e.g., transponders to measure travel patterns) create a virtual "digital person" for each of us.
A national statistical system making greater use of administrative and commercial data is worrisome. It can too easily breach the historic firewall between administrative and statistical data, which ensures that survey responses can never be used against a respondent because statistical data are not about individuals. Administrative data are about specific individuals, and linking the two information sources places at risk the protections historically associated with statistical information. Commercial data has a different problem. There, we find few controls over what is collected and how it is used. The public can refuse "intrusive" government questions; it cannot so easily say "leave me alone" to the conveniences of a digitized economy.

For three-quarters of a century, scholars have steadily improved survey data—from sampling theory to questionnaire wording. The federal statistical system, and thus the country, is a major beneficiary. No comparable effort has been mounted with respect to highly error-prone administrative data. Quality control in commercial information is even more serious. Commercial sites are not likely to welcome a stream of academic conferences on false-positives and false-negatives in their data.

There will be a decennial census in 2010, and in decades beyond. There will be government surveys. But voluntary compliance by a privacy-anxious population will continue to decline, not least because of the collateral damage that occurs when the Social Security Administration reveals an ad hoc policy of cooperation with Homeland Security or when a huge store of digitized records goes missing from a commercial site. If privacy concerns weaken statistical data, the government will not forego information. It will make more use of administrative and digital data. As was true for survey-based statistics, it will fall to social scientists to ensure that the "new" system meets standards of quality, transparency, access, and confidentiality.

Kenneth Prewitt is the Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs at Columbia University. Prewitt's research includes the use of ethnoracial classification in national statistics and the recent changes the classification has undergone. He serves on many professional advisory committees and is currently most active on the Committee on National Statistics of the National Research Council. Prewitt also has had a long professional career outside the classroom, as director of the U.S. Census Bureau (1998-2001), director of the National Opinion Research Center, president of the Social Science Research Council, and senior vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

[William]

"The government (and the economy) cannot function..."

Horror!

[Puke]

Of course, the alternative of not tracking everyone and everything they do is not an option for these asshats.