Well, this is what I do for a living. I'm one of the guys that, on bahalf of the Census Bureau, haggles with the White House and Congress over how the Census will be conducted and how much it will cost. The "sampling methodology" would've used traditional (but simplified) questionnaires for 90% of the population and then used those data to calculate a statistical estimation of "hard-to-enumerate" populations. Historically, an immense amount of money and effort has been expended to try to count the last 10% or so of the US population that doesn't want to be counted. The Supreme Court has ruled that we may not use statistically sampling for purposes of aportioning Congressional Seats. So, we'll get a couple of billion dollars more to try to "fully enumerate" the last 10% of the population. This will, in my opinion, result in a marginal increase in genealogically useful data collected. ============================================== X-Message: #1 Date: Sat, 13 Feb 1999 02:13:54 EST From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Message-ID: <[email protected]> Subject: [NEVILLE-L] 2000 Census Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Hi all, This is not a Neville question per se, but I'm hoping Shirley might know something about it. Have any of the genealogical societies discussed the impact on future generations if the US government uses statistical sampling for the 2000 census rather than the forms we filled out in 1990? Or am I misunderstanding something? I'm just curious, I've not seen it discussed in anything I've read. Congratulations on all the work you Enoch relations are doing. I'm not one of you, but it's exciting to watch from the sidelines. Thanks, Michelle Ule [email protected] Ukiah, CA Joseph Neville (1707~1792) VA