We were asked to create a timeline of the local number of households with children by household type. We extracted data from past Censuses, Census 2020 and recent 1-year ACS. We noticed some differences between the ACS and the DHC counts that seemed to be beyond the sampling error.
We than compared some numbers from DHC with ACS results at the national level and compared table P20 from the 2020 DHC with table B11012. Both tables include counts of cohabitating couples as a household type. We present only the male householder, no spouse or partner present as differences are most noticeable there.
Especially the Census count of male householders, no spouse/partner present with own children (2.0 million) seem to be very different from the 1.5 or 1.6 million according to the ACS. What can be behind these differences? The are also differences in the same direction for female householders, no spouse present and cohabitating couples, but less pronounced.
My thoughts go towards differences in coverage between ACS and Census, or imputation or processing differences. Does anyone know if imputation and processing differences can be ruled out?
Bottom line is the question: "How much caution is warranted when comparing Decennial counts on household type with ACS counts?"
Jan Vink
Hi Jan, I wonder if part of this difference could be due to differences in who is identified as "Person 1" in the decennial and ACS data? Beth Jarosz and I did some (unpublished) work a few years ago on this topic and found that in 2010, the share of households listing women as Person 1 was around 47 percent in the ACS, compared with 39 percent in the 2010 Census. So maybe some of those "male householders with children" in the 2020 Census were classified as female householders with children or grandmother-headed households or something else in the ACS?
But, if you're seeing the same pattern for female-headed households with kids (more in the DHC), then this doesn't explain it.
Mark, that is an interesting finding, but I agree that is not likely an explanation of the differences here. According to the DHC there were 6.6 million single female households with own children and the ACS shows a pretty consistent count of 6.25 million.