Undercount of Black Inner City Residents of New Orleans, Louisiana

The primary purpose of this report is to identify and explain census errors in terms of our hypotheses of the causes of undercount. The results of the evaluation of the causes of undercount for the target groups are based on the Alternative Enumeration (AE) and ethnographic observations. Many Black inner city areas are characterized by high rates of unemployment, poverty, illiteracy, substandard housing, disease, alienation, frustration, and hopelessness. These problems interact to create other problems, such as crime, welfare dependency, inadequate health and medical care, substance abuse, teenage pregnancy and mortality which lead, in turn, to certain types of adaptive behavioral responses by family members and also create difficult problems for census enumeration.