An approach for using administrative records to reduce contacts in the 2020 Decennial Census

Abstract

For the 2020 Decennial Census, the U.S. Census Bureau is researching how to use administrative record information from government and other sources in place of field visits during the Nonresponse Followup (NRFU) operation. This paper describes an approach for identifying vacant and occupied housing units to be enumerated using administrative records, removing them from the NRFU workload. While the approach allows flexibility in balancing cost and quality, we evaluate one possible scenario via a retrospective study of the 2010 Census.