Carmen Nobel, program director of Journalist’s Resource, inspired us to share this graphic presentation of the upcoming census. She writes, “Nonfiction cartoonist Josh Neufeld guides us through several issues to watch for as the 2020 census gets underway — including the risk of undercounts, the potential ramifications of an inaccurate count, the threat of misinformation and disinformation campaigns, and important dates on the census calendar.”
Sources and additional resources:
· This piece is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. For educators, editors and anyone else who would like to republish it in print, we are providing access to a high-resolution PDF here: Download the PDF.
· A related research roundup summarizes several studies that examine how census undercounts can hurt U.S. communities. The roundup includes the study that provided the information for the belt-tightening panel in the comic strip.
· “Estimating the Effect of Asking About Citizenship on the U.S. Census” is a Shorenstein Center discussion paper in which researchers find that “asking about citizenship status significantly increases the percent of questions skipped, with particularly strong effects among Hispanics, and makes respondents less likely to report having members of their household who are of Hispanic ethnicity.” The paper provided the information for the bar chart in the comic strip.
· “Can Cities Save the Census? A Local Framework for Our Nation’s First Digital Count” is a Shorenstein Center discussion paper that “provides a framework for understanding the challenges ahead and the ways in which cities can uniquely impact their own counts.”
· The Government Accountability Office’s 2019 High Risk List includes programs and operations deemed risky “due to their vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement, or that need transformation.”
· These 7 tips for covering the US census are meant to help bolster news coverage of the decennial event.
This article first appeared on Journalist’s Resource and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
