OCT. 6, 2022 — Today, the U.S. Census Bureau released 2020 Census operational quality metrics for individual counties and tracts. The metrics show how the census collected data within the counties and tracts and can provide insight on the quality of the 2020 Census.

The metrics available for both individual counties and tracts provide the:

• Percentage of addresses that self-responded.
• Percentage of addresses that responded online.
• Percentage of self-responses that were submitted online.
• Percentage of occupied housing units in the Nonresponse Followup (NRFU) operation that were resolved through a census taker interviewing a member of the household.
• Percentage of occupied housing units in NRFU that were resolved through a census taker interviewing a proxy (such as a neighbor or landlord).
• Percentage of occupied housing units in NRFU that were resolved through administrative records.

Two additional county-level metrics are available:

• Percentage of addresses within NRFU that provided only a population count to the census taker.
• The percentage of addresses that were unresolved and went to count imputation. (More information about that process is available in the blog, How We Complete the Census When Households or Group Quarters Don’t Respond.)

The Census Bureau had previously released substate summaries for each state showing the variation and spread in the range of these metrics among localities within each state. The Census Bureau decided to provide metrics for individual counties and tracts in response to stakeholder interest. To produce them, the Census Bureau used the 2020 Disclosure Avoidance System, based on differential privacy, to protect the privacy of respondents and the confidentiality of their responses. This is the same system used for all 2020 Census data products.

More information, including technical documentation and a set of frequently asked questions, is available on the 2020 Census Data Quality webpage.

No news release associated with this announcement. Tip sheet only.