Census Struggles to Get Accurate Count of a Key Group: Charity Workers

In the 1990 Census, some 1.1 million Latinos weren’t counted.

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Counting on Charities

Some 2 million children were missed. And, researchers say, some 1.6 million non-profit workers were overlooked as well.

While many charities have been working to insure that the people they serve aren’t undercounted in the 2000 Census, few have paid attention to whether their own field will be fully represented in next year’s survey of the American population.

The 1990 Census was the first time Americans were asked to report whether they work for a non-profit organization. Some 7.7 million people that year said they did.

But researchers say the question didn’t effectively measure the number of people who work for non-profit organizations.

Murray S. Weitzman, a researcher at Independent Sector, a Washington organization of charities and foundations that urged that the question be added to the 1990 census form, says he thinks the count was low because many people simply do not know whether they work for a non-profit group.

Moreover, although the census form asked people for the names of their employers, federal census workers did not verify the accuracy of the data by comparing the respondents’ answers with their employers’ actual status as a non-profit, for-profit, or government entity.

Kenneth Prewitt, the bureau’s director, said it did not have the capacity to analyze the accuracy of census responses beyond such basic data as age or race, but said the bureau would consider doing a separate study on the topic.

In a 1993 analysis, Independent Sector researchers reviewed the 1990 Census and compared that information with other data on employment at non-profit organizations.

The largest discrepancy that the researchers identified was in the field of health care. While the census counted non-profit hospital employment as 1.8 million, data from the American Hospital Association suggest that it is closer to 3 million.

Similarly, the 1990 Census reported that 745,000 people worked for non-profit colleges and universities, while Independent Sector estimated that the figure was closer to 988,100, after examining data from other federal sources.

Because the question will be asked the same way it was in 1990, experts say they don’t expect the 2000 census data to be any more accurate. Nevertheless, they say the question is still worth asking.

“It is an immensely useful question to ask because it instantly gives us a profile of the types of people working in the non-profit sector,” says Lester M. Salamon, director of the Center for Civil Society Studies at the Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore.

In addition to providing a total number of employees, the census data also provide a rich array of demographic information about them as a group, such as their racial makeup and average education and income levels.

“The dilemma we’ve had is that we are not sure the numbers we are getting are accurate numbers, compared to other sources of information on the same variable,” Mr. Salamon observed. “The question is, Is there something that can be done to improve the quality?”

That’s the very question Mr. Salamon is currently trying to answer in his own research. He recently received $125,000 from the Surdna Foundation, in New York, and $40,000 from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, in Flint, Mich., to develop a new method for measuring non-profit employment.

Rather than ask workers, he is turning to data from their employers. Mr. Salamon plans to examine the numbers of people employed by different organizations — data that are already collected quarterly by states and submitted to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics — and match those data with the state’s records on which of the organizations are non-profit groups.

“We are convinced this will give us a better fix on the number of non-profit employees,” he says.

In the interim, he said, non-profit organizations might want to make more of an effort to educate their employees about the fact that they work for a non-profit group as a way to improve the accuracy of responses to the 2000 Census. “I suppose that would be a great idea for the sector,” he says, “to put out notices around census time to remind their workers that they work for a non-profit.”