The Census Bureau's Preparations for the 1990 Decennial Census

Gao ID: 129876 May 14, 1986

GAO discussed the Census Bureau's questionnaire development and data-capture technology for the 1990 decennial census. GAO found that the Bureau should: (1) limit the use of short census form to obtaining a population count; (2) weigh the need for all households to supply the housing information requested in the long form; (3) simplify the short form to reduce overall cost and increase the response rate from respondents with marginal literacy skills; and (4) revise the short form's housing section and remove questions that the pretest showed were too complicated, personal, unnecessary, or surreptitious. GAO also found that the Bureau missed opportunities to significantly improve the 1990 census by: (1) not testing a shorter form; (2) planning to manually edit the census questionnaires; (3) not considering the use of optical mark reader equipment for processing census data; and (4) deciding to use the FACT film-to-tape data-capture system. GAO plans to monitor the developments on data-capture and processing-office configurations because of their importance in the decennial census.



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