information for practice

The fundamental goal of the U.S. decennial census is to count each person living in the country once, only once, and in the correct place. Since its inception, the census has followed a variant of a de jure standard for defining residence, seeking to count people at a single “usual residence.” The census does contain some elements for which the alternative de facto standard—counting people at their current residence or where they are found at census time—is used, including operations to count the homeless. However, what was true for the first U.S. census in 1790 remains so for the 2010 and future censuses: residence can be extremely difficult to define and measure. Though most census respondents can readily identify a single usual residence, some people may have ties to two or more residences, and others may lack ties to any fixed residence. The basic concept of “residence” has evolved over time and can vary greatly across segments of the population, as can related concepts like “house,” “home,” and “family.”