The goal of the decennial census is to count every person living in the United States. Inevitably, some individuals are omitted, while others are counted more than once. These two types of errors can, in some cases, cancel each other out and result in a net count that accurately reflects the population. If the number omitted is higher than the number of duplicates, the result is a net undercount. There is a well-established literature going back decades indicating that young children (under age five) and racial and ethnic minorities are systematically undercounted at higher rates than other groups. For example, in the 1940 Census males aged 21-35 were undercounted by about 3%, but Black males in that same age group were undercounted by about 13% (Price 1947). Indeed, the net undercount for the Black population overall has persistently tracked higher than for the non-Black population. In 1940 the undercount estimates were 8.4% and 5.0%, respectively – a gap of 3.4 percentage points – and in 2010 that gap was 3 percentage points (O’Hare et. al 2020). By age, the net undercount of young children has tracked higher than any other age group over the past several decades, and in 2020 hit a historic high of 5.4% (Jensen 2022).
Over the decades, numerous causes and correlates have been identified as contributing to the undercount and attempts to implement operational changes that address those causes and correlates have met with varying success. One such contributing factor that persists is trust: some people are missing because they want to be missed. This paper outlines a research proposal designed to address the trust issue in a novel way (at least for the Census Bureau) by leveraging a community-based participatory research approach. The agenda includes an exploration of how to identify and recruit staff members from community-based organizations (CBOs) to participate as co-researchers along with census staff. The collective research team of CBO and Census staff would then conduct qualitative research exploring the reasons young children were omitted from the census form. The research agenda incorporates one more novel feature: using administrative records to identify a targeted sample of individuals in households where young children actually were omitted from a household roster. Research goals, detailed protocols, site selection and hypothetical schedules are offered in the spirit of a road map for a future project.