Census 2010

[skibumdc]

Originally Posted by mithrilG60

Besides your tax dollars are paying for this exercise and you can bet that it's cheaper to pay the census takers to mail out the forms and do the resulting data entry than is it to pay bureaucrats to pull this information from multiple sources across several departments and/or levels of government.

True.

Originally Posted by mithrilG60

If collated by geographical district they can make predictions about future school use based on population trends. For example if district A has 50% of households where the age is under 40 and district B has 65% of households over 50 you know that district A is likely to need more school services simply because it has a higher percentage of it's population in their child bearing and rearing years.

While mostly true, neighborhoods and zip codes can change drastically in the 10 years between censuseseses. sp?
Example: The Northern Virginia landscape has changed so dramatically over the past decade, the census data taken in 2000 has been worthless for school planning since 2002.

We still need the census, but the data is truly only useful in a suburban environment like the DC Metro area for 2 years. Demographics, income levels, age groups can change in as little as a year based on an article in the Post.

[mithrilG60]

Originally Posted by skibumdc

While mostly true, neighborhoods and zip codes can change drastically in the 10 years between censuseseses. sp?
Example: The Northern Virginia landscape has changed so dramatically over the past decade, the census data taken in 2000 has been worthless for school planning since 2002.

We still need the census, but the data is truly only useful in a suburban environment like the DC Metro area for 2 years. Demographics, income levels, age groups can change in as little as a year based on an article in the Post.

That's quite true, but those are the limitations imposed by the census mechanism the US has chosen to implement, so it is what you have to work with. Partially to overcome the data validity due to age issue Canada does a census every 5 years instead of every 10. Our census also asks for much more detail in some areas (level of education, income levels, marital status, employment, etc) and the general statistical information is released publicly almost immediately. I don't know how long the waiting period is to get individual specific data though as I've never really gotten into genealogy or family research.