Authors: Allen Otterstrom
Mentors: Joe Price
Insitution: Brigham Young University
Data quality is a key input in efforts to link individuals across census records. We examine the extreme version of low data quality by identifying census US enumerators in the US who fabricated entire families. We provide clear evidence of fake people included in the census in Homestead, Pennsylvania. We use the features of this case study to identify other places where there seem to be fake people. Our automated approach identifies census sheets that have much lower match rates to other census records that would be expected, given the characteristics of the people recorded on each sheet.