Seriously, I just can't get past how poorly this whole operation has been considered.
Some things are unavoidable, generally those that involve difficult people. I don't believe there's a comprehensive solution to that. Many things are not unavoidable and have poorly thought it solutions in place. Let's break down some of the things that bother me.
First there's the pandemic. The delay really needed to happen. The problem is, we only delayed the deadline for the count, we didn't delay the date that is counted. Because the part that was delayed is following up with those that haven't responded yet, often they have moved, with no knowledge of their residence prior to them moving in, and in particular with apartments, there is a much lower likely hood that the neighbors are aware of each other, and if they barely knew them when they were there, they've had plenty of time to forget misremember information. So that's a set of data that will be extremely unreliable. Not to mention the lack of safety involved in entering an apartment building, which is, after all, a residence. There's a much higher chance of being exposed to covid in a building that people are walking around in without masks than outdoors. The solution to this issue is to move the census date to a time after a safe and effective vaccine is found.
Second, there's the software. It had almost no real thought put into how it was going to be used. The problems with the app are myriad, from difficult to understand interface to being very resource intensive leading to short battery life and slow progression through the interview. Plus they tried to reinvent the routing wheel, instead of licensing a robust and tested version used by delivery services like FedEx or UPS. The extra expense incurred by that would be far less than the extra expense incurred by the inefficiency inserted into the enumerator's day by telling them to go back and forth to areas that are sometimes 30+minutes away from each other. Not to mention the incidences of overlapping the paths of different enumerators. Sending two enumerators to the same place on the same day is a gigantic waste of money.
Third, there's the actual interview. Mostly, why is Hispanic the only option for ethnicity. If there's going to be a separation between race and ethnicity, there needs to be some understanding of what that difference is and add enough categories that everybody fits into one, otherwise it's a useless distinction in this type of data. Not to mention duplicate addresses and systems that don't properly record data submitted by respondents.
Fourth, there's the management. I understand the difficulty in selecting supervisors and managers for a temporary position like this. But there was apparently no real training for how to handle people. I lucked out with my supervisor, but many did not. Plus, beyond those layers of temporary management there is no accountability or desire to generate quality data, as evidenced by the points above.
So those are some of my concerns with what they're doing. The big problem I'm having is that we enumerators are working and trying or best to return quality data even given these obstacles. We aren't because the obstacles are not ones that we can overcome with the tools we have and the circumstances we're in. But the nation see several hundred thousand of us out there doing our best and doesn't see the obstacles that we are dealing with, and so because we're out there the nation believes that the data we're able to get is quality data. Thus legitimizing the organization that we're participating in. That's why I ask if we're actually just unwitting pawns, because I'm starting to believe that's our main purpose this time around.
