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发帖数: 29846 | 1 美国统计局说，最初公布的同性家庭的数字比修正后数字高出40%
Census Bureau Admits It 'Artifcially Inflated the Number of Same-Sex Couples'
By Elizabeth Harrington
September 28, 2011
In the Gay Pride Parade in New York City in 2009, a float portrayed a
wedding cake with a same-sex couple on top of it. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
(CNSNews.com) - The Census Bureau admitted Tuesday that it had “
artificially inflated the number of same-sex couples” in the United States,
initially reporting a number that was about 40 percent higher than what it
now believes is accurate.
The original data published by the 2010 Census set the number of same-sex
households in the U.S. in 2010 at 901,997, including 349,377 same-sex
married couple households and 552,620 same-sex unmarried partner households.
But the Census Bureau said in a Tuesday conference call with reporters that
it has revised these numbers downward “because Census Bureau staff
discovered an inconsistency in the responses in the 2010 Census summary file
statistics that artificially inflated the number of same-sex couples.”
The Census Bureau now says the 2010 Census found that there were 131,729
same-sex married couple households and 514,735 same-sex unmarried partner
households in the United States--for a total of 646,464 same-sex-couple
households.
Given that the Census Bureau says there were 116,716,292 total households in
the United States in 2010, that means same-sex households made up only 0.55
percent of the total. Had there actually been 901,997 same-sex households
in the United States--the "artificially inflated" number the Census Bureau
originally reported--that would have equaled ony 0.77 percent of the
households in the country.
According to the Census Bureau, the problem with the Census data on same-sex
couples was due to “data capture errors” that were caused by the
confusing layout on the 2010 Census forms--“the matrix format”--where
entering a person’s sex often did not accurately reflect that person’s
gender.
Households are identified as same-sex based on the sex of the responder and
the relationship of the household members, as either unmarried partner or
husband or wife, according to the Census Bureau.
Boxes on the Census form for “male” and “female” were stacked on top of
each other, making it more likely for a person to mark the wrong gender or
make erroneous lines, changing the results.
“After discovering the inconsistency, Census Bureau staff developed another
set of estimates to provide a more accurate way to measure same-sex couple
households,” the news release said.
“The revised figures were developed by using an index of names to re-
estimate the number of same-sex married and unmarried partners by the sex
commonly associated with the person's first name,” the Census Bureau said.
The Census Bureau “Names Index” matched common names to their
corresponding genders, such as identifying “John” or “Thomas” as male
and “Elizabeth” and “Virginia” as female. The index helped solve the “
name-sex inconsistencies” which had increased the numbers of same-sex
couples.
After it accounted for the “data capture errors,” the number of same-sex
couples in the country was revised to 646,464 from 901,997. Thus, the Census
Bureau had "artificially inflated" the number of same-sex couples by 255,
533--or 39.5 percent.
The Census Bureau said that the errors were not realized until it was too
late to alter the 2010 forms.
But the inaccuracies prompted the Bureau to devise a “Preferred Estimate,”
revealed Tuesday, to more accurately depict the incidences of same-sex
households, according to Martin O’Connell, chief of the Fertility and
Family Statistics Branch of the U.S. Census Bureau, during a conference call
to highlight the new data.
“There is no dispute that same-sex couple population increased between 2000
and 2010," said O’Connell, during the briefing.
“What we tried to do was try to get a better grip on exactly what the
numbers were and what the actual increase was,” he said. "We tried to
eliminate population numbers that seemed artificially high using this
estimate, and that's what we came up with."
In 2000, the number of same-sex households, as calculated by the 2000 Census
, was 594,391. |
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