Wednesday, May 11 

Alisu Schoua-Glusberg, Research Support Services Inc 

Eleanor Gerber brought to the Census Bureau her ethnographic training and experience, and used it to enrich the methodological work she carried out at the Bureau. Although she was, by no means, the first anthropologist working in survey methods at the agency, she may arguably be the one who left the strongest mark in the work of a generation of researchers who benefitted from working with and learning from her. Her legacy lies in the integration of a cultural focus to the study of any issue in survey and instrument design, from research on privacy, to rostering, to race and ethnicity, to the issue of census undercoverage and duplication. Even a decade later, on some of these topics her work gives us the most complete look to date. A case in point is that of understanding how and why some persons are counted more than once in the decennial census. This presentation will illustrate Dr. Gerber’s work on a couple of qualitative studies on duplication and on undercoverage that followed the 2010 census, and give examples of the study methods and findings from these research efforts. The presentation will specifically focus on what we learned about the duplication and undercoverage of children, a topic that the Census Bureau continues to study and grapple with.