Social Science Space

When the fixed categories of a census erase the diversity of a population, the gross miscalculations that result may harm a country’s ability to appropriately respond to the needs of its people.

U.S. President Joe Biden announced that he would nominate Robert Santos, president of the American Statistical Association, as director of the Census Bureau.

Could the 2020 iteration of the United States Census, the constitutionally mandated count of everyone present in the nation, be the last of its kind?

This week the Appropriations Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives approved the budget bill that includes funding for the National Science Foundation. The Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations Act (CJS) proposes increasing funding for the NSF — which is the largest source of research funding for university social and behavioral science in the United States – by $270 million above the current year’s appropriation.

The concept of the labor force describes a person’s employment status, and like all U.S. Census Bureau definitions, the terminology is quite specific. The labor force consists of all people 16 years of age or older who are working (employed), are not working but are actively seeking work (unemployed)…

When most Americans think of the census, they think of the 10-year or decennial census that is used to gather basic data about the total population. The decennial census is an actual count of people and housing units, and it serves as the baseline for measuring and generating other census data-sets…

Geographer Frank Donnelly notes that census geography and maps are not automatically reliable – they can be used to intentionally skew research findings.

The social science community has a large stake in the accuracy of the U.S. Census for the community’s contued research. Here, law professor Jonathan Entin discusses the legal controversy swirling around the impact a question on citizenship has on the census, something the U.S. Supreme Court is hearing about this week.

As details emerged on March 11 about the president’s fiscal year 2020 budget, it became increasingly clear that science funding would once again be targeted for significant spending cuts. But a new target also emerged – federal spending on education.

The House and Senate failed to enact appropriations legislation to fund several federal departments and agencies, and, as a result, the federal government experienced a partial government shutdown effective December 22. But there has been some action – the Senate confirmed the nominations of Kelvin Droegemeier as director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and Steven Dillingham as director of the U.S. Census Bureau.

For the first time in more than 20 years, Congress enacted into law the annual Labor-Health and Human Services-Education Act prior to the end of the fiscal year and for the first time in more than 10 years it did the same for the Defense Appropriations Act. What it didn’t do is approve the bill that funds the National Science Foundation.

UPDATED: Many academic groups that use U.S Census data for research fear the negative effects of including a question about citizenship on the 2020 count. “Adding a new citizenship question to the 2020 Census would destroy any chance for an accurate count, discard years of careful research, and increase costs significantly,” wrote The Leadership Conference, an umbrella group.