Comment thread for a more open ended question: How much should the census lean towards consistently asking the same questions vs veering wildly into new questions? (I’m assuming that the total question count needs to stay basically constant.)
If we ask the same questions every year, we get to track changes and we get to average out some noise. Some questions ask about things I’d expect to change year by year, like age or income.
If we ask new questions, we get to find out new things we’d never learn by previous questions. There’s a fun, playful kind of curiosity in just asking things you want to know.
Right now I’m leaning a little more towards the new, but it’s also been about five years since the last survey with big turnout so there’s more value than usual in getting the baselines clear.
Comment thread for a more open ended question: How much should the census lean towards consistently asking the same questions vs veering wildly into new questions? (I’m assuming that the total question count needs to stay basically constant.)
If we ask the same questions every year, we get to track changes and we get to average out some noise. Some questions ask about things I’d expect to change year by year, like age or income.
If we ask new questions, we get to find out new things we’d never learn by previous questions. There’s a fun, playful kind of curiosity in just asking things you want to know.
Right now I’m leaning a little more towards the new, but it’s also been about five years since the last survey with big turnout so there’s more value than usual in getting the baselines clear.