Enumeration Nation

Examines how cultural factors shape Census data by analyzing the 1970 shift to self-enumeration, highlighting the need for rigor in data collection to avoid flawed policy decisions.

When conducting social science research, scholars often ignore troublesome questions concerning how data are collected, what they represent, and its suitability for inference. By looking closer at the provenance of data, we see that scientists design survey instruments from pre-existing beliefs and participants respond according to their own perspective. In Enumeration Nation, Joseph Ballegeer takes a relational understanding of data for a cultural history of science to investigate the 1970 census. The story of 1970 begins in 1960 with a series of statistical studies designed to identify and measure statistical bias in the census, ultimately finding that enumerators consistently over- or underestimated their own observations and that inner-city neighborhoods presented obstacles to completely counting people. To address these shortcomings, the Census Bureau decided to “just ask people” to respond to the census directly. Enumeration Nation explores how participants in the 1970 transition to self-enumeration implemented new methods of collecting and providing responses to the census to show that data are less objective “truth” and more a cultural artifact.

Following the three components of scientific observation—the observer, the instrument, and the observed—demonstrates how culture is part and parcel of data generation. The observers, Bureau statisticians, entered the post-war period bearing a responsibility to produce valid data for objective policy making. Bureau staff, collaborating with external experts, sought to address the 1960 shortcomings and provide a representative composition to policy makers. Their success with self-enumeration relied on an address list that completely identified where people lived before mailing questionnaires. To validate their sample frame, the Bureau tapped Post Office mail carriers, who had an intimate understanding of day-to-day life within the urban communities where households were pressed into difficult living conditions by decades of targeted housing practices. These geographies that census identified as difficult to enumerate were at the center of the protests, violent repression, and social movements that contributed to the 1960s becoming turbulent. Americans, the observed, living in the inner city received the 1970 questionnaire with conflicted motivations to either take an opportunity to ensure their representation or boycott participation in an act of resistance. From each of these standpoints, we see a slot where the beliefs and actions of the participants to shape the statistics were finally reported in census tables.

In Enumeration Nation, Ballegeer mines Census Bureau documents, federal administrative records, and contemporary media accounts to present the perspectives of each of the components of data generation. Historians have drawn on census schedules and government records to effectively argue that numbers in a spreadsheet are more than meets the eye. This study extends those works by showing that advances in survey methodology itself are a product of cultural interaction. A particularly important lesson should be that challenges in data collection can be a feature of the object study itself rather than a bug in methodology. The demand for empirically informed decisions has only grown since 1960, but without the rigor of professional data collection, prioritizing convenience risks making inefficient decisions.