Source: NC DEMOGRAPHY, 5/20/20


Every household that doesn’t fill out the census form online, by mail, or by phone—known as “self-response”—enters the Census Bureau’s non-response follow-up (NRFU) universe. During NRFU, the Census Bureau sends trained enumerators door-to-door to collect census responses directly. This is an expensive and time-consuming process. NRFU was supposed to start in May 2020 but has been delayed due to COVID-19.

The Census Bureau currently plans to begin NRFU operations in mid-August. To understand which communities this might impact, we examined shifts in the tracts with the lowest self-response (bottom 20%) and compared low response rates on March 20th with the lowest responding tracts as of May 17th. (The bottom 20% is a fluid group. The tracts in the bottom can change week to week as certain communities increase their response rates.)

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