Compared to 2010, Golden Triangle residents are self-responding to the 2020 census at a lower rate, data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows.
The decline in area self-response rates — the percentage of residents who respond to the census questionnaire on their own without census worker interviews — is partly due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused delays in the census process, said Marilyn Stephens, assistant regional census manager for the Atlanta Region, which oversees Mississippi.
The deadline to respond to the census either by oneself or through a worker interview, Stephens said, is Sept. 30.
As of Wednesday, with roughly two weeks left until the deadline, 87.1 percent of Mississippi households have responded to the 2020 census, according to the Census Bureau. So far, 27.6 percent of the state’s households have been counted after follow-up interviews from census workers. Only 59.5 percent of Mississippi households self-responded, which represents a drop from its 2010 self-response rate of 61.3 percent and is lower than the national average of 66 percent this year.
In the four-county area, counties have all seen a decline in self-response rates from the figures in 2010. Lowndes County has a self-response rate of 63.3 percent, which is higher than the state average but still represents a slight decline from the 64.9-percent rate in 2010. Other counties have also witnessed their self-response rates drop, with Oktibbeha’s figure plunging from 61.1 to 52.3, Clay’s from 63.8 to 59.5 and Noxubee’s from 57.7 to 45.1, data shows.
Stephens said the lower rates reflect the impact of the pandemic, which delayed the field process by months. In rural Mississippi where there is no mailbox service, census workers have to hand-deliver materials to the residents. However, soon after the process began in March, the pandemic hit the state, and the office had to cease the operations until May 4, she said.
“The pandemic had a tremendous effect, because we had to hand deliver and we had to stop that process,” she said. “Everybody was saying, ‘Watch your mail. The Census Bureau is going to send you this.’ They weren’t getting anything.”
The office also hoped to start follow-up interviews by July, Stephens said. But with a rise in the state’s COVID-19 cases, operations had to be delayed until Aug. 11, she said.
During a pandemic, residents who would normally respond to the census on their own may be distracted in a scramble to satisfy their basic needs, Stephens said. Many are experiencing furloughs, working from home and trying to feed their families with meals from food distribution sites, she said.
“Now people have multiple priorities,” she said. “The census that would normally be at the top of mind is on the back burner.”
Additionally, with many people believing the way to answer a census questionnaire is still waiting for a worker to knock on their doors, it is hard to change people’s mindset, Stephens said. This year, the Census Bureau is offering three options to collect census responses by mail, by phone or online, she said, which is a new feature, but many still don’t know or don’t trust them.
“Most people still think that the primary method that we conduct the census is that we come to your house to the living room or the front porch of the family, collect information right there while we are sipping lemonade and iced tea,” Stephens said. “Now we’ve got to re-educate the public about (responding) online, and then we’ve got to assure them that the same trust they had in sending back the paper form, we had to put those safeguards in place based on the law for online and telephone response.”
With all the setbacks, however, Stephens said she is optimistic that the pandemic would not affect the final response rate. Response is required by law, she said, and the bureau is not experiencing any census worker shortage. Many of them who were furloughed from their full-time jobs asked to work more hours as a census worker, she said, and they leave a visit card with instructions on how to self-respond if they fail to collect a response from a household.
“Failure is not an option,” she said.
It is important to be counted, Stephens said, and she hopes people can actively respond to the census. The size of the population is the base of how the federal government allocates funds in terms of emergency management, health care access, education, senior services and unemployment benefits, she said.
“Mississippi definitely needs its rightful share of the federal resources over the next 10 years,” she said. “When a disaster strikes, we look at our elected officials to help us immediately, and they can only do that through the funding that comes from the federal government. And in those formulas, what weighs the heaviest are these population statistics. And we should all ask ourselves: Will our numbers reflect our needs over the next 10 years?”
You can self-respond to the 2020 census by mailing out the response, visiting 2020census.gov to fill out the questionnaire or calling 844-330-2020.
Yue Stella Yu was previously a reporter for The Dispatch.
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