About this time every decade, the U.S. begins to hanker for the next great national self-portrait. That old still life that told us who we were -- magnificent as it once was in scope and detail -- has grown dusty and is ready for the closet.
It's the time when the Census Bureau begins mustering the army of enumerators and tabulators who will reach across the country to tally us up in all our dynamism and diversity.
But in the age of the information superhighway, who expects to wait until 2010 to know how many grown-ups in the neighborhood have moved back in with Mom and Dad?
So today, doing as much as a tradition-bound institution can to embrace the future, the Census Bureau is doing something different: premiering what amounts to Census, the Movie.
At 9:01 PST tonight, census officials will release to the public a giant collection of data that will offer the first geographically detailed look at the new, annual American Community Survey. (Locate the "American Fact Finder" site through an Internet search engine and then follow the links to the American Community Survey.) The change marks a turning point for professional demographers and amateurs alike, promising a much fresher look at social trends but introducing nettlesome limitations.
"The good news is we're now going to have data every year," said William H. Frey, demographer for the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. "Ten years is a long time to wait in a society that moves as fast as ours does."
The downside is that instead of a single, massive sample providing a snapshot of information clear down to individual neighborhoods, the survey will be a rolling average of samples taken each year.
The Census Bureau, which has been previewing the survey with smaller releases over the last three years, has compared the change to switching from a photograph to a video. Ken Hodges, chief demographer for the firm Nielsen Claritas, sees it more as time exposure.
"Instead of a snapshot of a guy running across the street, you'd see a photo of a guy in the street and it looks like he is running," Hodges said. "You see this blur running across the street. It might look a little like a guy." The blur, he said, is analogous to what demographic changes look like when averaged over several years.
The rolling estimates present an obstacle for demographers including Paul Ong, professor of urban planning, social welfare and Asian American studies at UCLA.
