Dr. Bill O’Hare’s report provides an overview of the implications of the Supplemental Demographic and Housing Characteristics (S-DHC) file released by the Census Bureau in September 2024. This file, the last from the 2020 Census, uniquely employs a variant of Differential Privacy (DP) called PHSafe, which retains the connection between children and their parents during data processing. O’Hare highlights how this approach affects the availability and granularity of data, particularly regarding young children. The S-DHC contains fewer tables and less detailed demographic information compared to previous Census files, raising concerns about the potential loss of critical data for child advocacy and research in Census Bureau products such as the American Community Survey and the Current Population Survey. The article emphasizes the importance of maintaining child-parent linkages in data collection, as many measures of child well-being rely on this connection, and calls for careful consideration of privacy versus data accuracy in future Census Bureau surveys.
