********** C E N S U S 2 0 0 0 B U L L E T I N ********** Vol. 2 - No. 45 Nov. 24, 1998 Citing a need to reduce the workload for "the large household followup" and expected overall coverage improvements, especially among hard-to-enumerate populations, the Census Bureau has decided to adopt a six-person questionnaire design. This will apply to both the short and long forms in the Census 2000 plan, which includes scientific sampling, and in an alternative plan, which calls for traditional census-taking methods. The Census Bureau anticipates that the change from a five-person to a six-person questionnaire for forms that are mailed out or delivered by enumerators to housing units for mailback will cut followup workload for large households in half. Planning estimates put the number of mailback households with seven or more persons at slightly more than 1 million households versus about 4 million households with six or more. The issue was revisited recently during discussions about ways that the Census Bureau might increase coverage in a census that does not include statistical sampling to supplement traditional methods. With deadlines for advertising printing specifications scheduled for October 1998, it was found to be more cost-effective to require six-person forms only, notwithstanding a final decision on sampling. The alternative would have necessitated printing two sets of questionnaires for the entire country, a prohibitive expense. Other advantages of the six-person questionnaire: --it retains the design initiatives developed in the commercially designed form to make an easy-to-complete, respondent-friendly questionnaire. --it can be introduced into the Census Bureau's basic system for data capture and mailback questionnaire processing without major disruption. --it provides for a slight positive advantage in the Integrated Coverage Measurement survey one of the components in the current sampling plan through more timely data capture of complete large households. --it reduces respondent burden by requiring six-person households to respond only once by using a mailback questionnaire designed for households with six persons, rather than one for five (which would have required additional reporting by the six-person households). Disadvantages of the six-person mailback questionnaire are few. Although followup is reduced by an estimated 50 percent, there are overall higher costs associated with the six-person mailback questionnaire due to the long form data capture method, which involves capture of each page regardless of the number of persons in the household. Also, the additional width of the short-form is another area of higher costs. Both, however, were considered to be relatively minor cost increases when balanced against data quality erosion and losses resulting from the two-stage enumeration for large households. For further information about Census 2000 Bulletins, contact J. Paul Wyatt of the Public Information Office on 301-457-3052 (fax: 301-457-3670; e-mail: pwyatt(a)census.gov).