Census coming to mailbox near you

The census data will be used to provide a count of citizens in the U.S. This month, Uncle Sam's looking for some answers. And by law, everyone in America must supply them. As mandated by the Constitution, this year the members of nearly every household in the United States will receive a simple questionnaire asking about their lives. The Census -- conducted every 10 years -- aims to provide the government both with aggregate data about Americans as a whole and a complete count of every citizen in the United States. "Census figures affect our lives in just about as many ways as you can imagine," explained Judy Antipin, spokeswoman for the Regional Census Center for Philadelphia. "They're used to distribute literally billions of dollars in state and federal money to communities every year." By April 1, every household in the United States is required to return the census forms that have been arriving in American mailboxes for the past several weeks. While students living off campus should fill out and return their forms like the average household, Partnership Coordinator for the Regional Census Center Lyn Kirshenbaum said dormitories and on-campus housing are enumerated as "special places," leading to a slightly different census-taking process. "A contact person and census liaison, appointed in each dorm, will hand them out to residents and collect them later on to return to the Census Bureau," Kirshenbaum said. As a result, students living on campus will not receive census forms in their mailboxes. Census forms should be available in dorms sometime in early April, past the deadline for mail-in questionnaires. Antipin also emphasized that Penn students need to identify themselves as residents of Philadelphia regardless of what they consider as their hometown. "It's important students do this because they're using services in the community where they're living, and it's important for these communities to get their fair share of resources," she said. "That's something that students often don't realize." Kirshenbaum added that there is a "huge undercount of students in the city where they're living." Five out of six American households will receive a short seven-question form asking, among other things, about the age, name, sex, race and possibility of Latino origin of every household resident. The remaining one-sixth of households will instead fill out a longer, 34- question form asking for detailed information about things like family income and educational level. A random process selects whether a household will receive the longer or shorter form. While the data will largely be used by the government to help allocate funds, Antipin also said that businesses use aggregate data about a community to help guide decisions about investing in that area. "It tells you about the workforce, and helps tell you whether your business will do well there," she explained. This year, Antipin said, the government launched the first-ever paid advertising campaign to encourage households to fill out and return the forms. She noted that census advertisements have been shown during the Oprah show and the Super Bowl. "This in an advertising campaign geared towards all kinds of special populations," Antipin said. Minorities are being especially targeted, she added, with advertisements running on Latino and Korean television channels. "Minority populations are among the groups that have historically been undercounted in previous censuses," she explained. Also for the first time, the form will be available in six languages other than English to help recent immigrants or those unfamiliar with English fill out the census form.

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