William P. O'Hare Knihy

Focusing on the use of child indicators in advocacy, this book offers a comprehensive conceptual framework that unifies various efforts across governments, NGOs, and academia. It highlights key concepts supported by diverse examples from multiple countries, illustrating how data can educate, raise awareness, monitor progress, set goals, and evaluate programs for children. As the field of child well-being grows, this resource fills a gap in literature, providing scholars with tools to effectively integrate child indicators into public advocacy efforts.

Focusing on the significant issue of young children's undercount in the U.S. Census, this book analyzes the 2010 Census data, revealing that nearly one million children under age 5 were missed. It highlights trends in the undercount over time, geographic disparities, and potential reasons for the persistent and growing undercount, which has outpaced that of any other age group for decades. Despite the increasing number of young children, this critical demographic issue has largely been overlooked by both demographers and the general public.

This open access book describes the differences in US census coverage, also referred to as “differential undercount”, by showing which groups have the highest net undercounts and which groups have the greatest undercount differentials, and discusses why such undercounts occur. In addition to focusing on measuring census coverage for several demographic characteristics, including age, gender, race, Hispanic origin status, and tenure, it also considers several of the main hard-to-count populations, such as immigrants, the homeless, the LBGT community, children in foster care, and the disabled. However, given the dearth of accurate undercount data for these groups, they are covered less comprehensively than those demographic groups for which there is reliable undercount data from the Census Bureau. This book is of interest to demographers, statisticians, survey methodologists, and all those interested in census coverage.