The Official U.S. Census Bureau Population Estimates by Demographic Characteristics: Requirements, Evaluation, and Future Directions

Matthew Christenson, U.S. Census Bureau

The Population Division of the U.S. Census Bureau recently instituted a project to recommend ways to improve the methods for the official sub-national population estimates with age, sex, race, and Hispanic origin detail. This project was necessary in order to take advantage of newly available data, to update aspects of the current methods developed under the constraints of outdated technology, and to correct some irregularities that have been identified in the estimates data. The intended products of this project are four-fold: (1) Requirements to evaluate the suitability of the methods and data for the sub-national population estimates; (2) Competing proposals for how to improve the methods; (3) Test code and provisional estimates based on the proposed changes; and (4) Evaluation of the proposed methods and provisional data. This paper will detail the conditions that made this project necessary and summarize the work on the project to date.