This brief compares the undercount of young children in US counties with 20 factors that might contribute to such undercounts, to see which factors correlate with the undercount. While no single factor stands out as having a very high relationship with the young child undercount, there are many factors that have at least a moderate correlation with young child undercount rates. The results, consistent with past research, strongly suggest the census coverage of young children and the total population are driven by different factors. This means it is important for the Census Bureau to develop operations, methods, and a communication outreach campaign for young children separate from those for total population in the 2030 Census. It also means community efforts to improve responses to the Census must have special strategies for counting young children.
The only factor that seems to be statistically significant in the same way for both total population and young children is the percentage of adults with less than a high school degree, which suggests that improving efforts to reach households with low literacy could improve the count of both the total population and young children.
The brief shows that the largest counties (those with at least one million people) have much higher net young child undercount rates than smaller counties. The briefs shows that two domains are more strongly associated with young child coverage: Race/Ethnicity and Immigration, and Family Structure/ Living Arrangements domains. In contrast, the Housing domain shows a lower degree of association with young child coverages rates.
Because the Census operational plans take years to develop, the Census Bureau needs to assess substantial and innovative methods for accurately counting young children soon in order to embed successful approaches into the 2030 Census operations.
