Description of the Census

Public health policy decisions and needs assessments are predicated on interpretations and conclusions drawn from combining the results from many individuals or a population. The use of current estimates of population characteristics is necessary to make estimates of disease, injury, disability, behaviors of interest to public health, and their distributions. Often, these estimates require population denominators from the census.

The decennial census provides us basic information on the number of persons and their demographic, socioeconomic, and household characteristics. Since our activities in public health must be predicated on a count of the population to be served, this census data supplies us with the denominators for our morbidity and mortality rates. It also provides us with count data that we may use when applying rates and proportions obtained on various issues from national or state surveys. For example, the state Behavioral Risk Factor Survey identified that 20% of households with children had an adult who smoked cigarettes. If a local community wanted to target households with children as their first cut in an anti-smoking program, they would use census data to obtain the total number of households with children and calculate 20% of them to be the number they would target for the program.

Census data can be used to support MCH planning by:

• identifying estimates for the total number of persons eligible for a particular program and the subsequent calculation of program coverage (number served divided by the target population estimate);
• identifying risk markers for adverse behaviors or health outcomes, e.g., poverty status, occupation, and so forth;
• developing indices by combining risk factors (e.g., the rate of single-parent households living in poverty combined with the proportion of families living in poverty); and,
• comparing the characteristics of a community to the state or to other communities.

   

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