Connecticut's Self-Response Rate Has Gone Down to 17th Among the 50 States

Every day, the US Census Bureau updates its Census 2020 self-responses dataset, where it reports figures by state and town. CTData Collaborative will be looking at those numbers to make sure Connecticut is on the right track to have each person counted!

What is the self-response rate? This is the percentages of households in each census tract that have completed their questionnaires online, by paper, and by phone. Census tracts are smaller areas that make up cities and towns. The Census Bureau has a master list of addresses for each census tract, and it calculates the percent of completed questionnaires from that master address list. (See more here).

As of Monday, April 13, 2020, 50.3% of Connecticut residents had responded to the 2020 Census. That puts Connecticut 17th among the 50 states.

Connecticut dropped 3 spots from last week and ranked 17th among the 50 states. Minnesota led the way with a rate of 58.1%, and Alaska lagged with a rate of 32.4%.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau (2020). Response rates | 2020 Census. Retrieved on April 15, 2020 from https://2020census.gov/en/response-rates.html

Connecticut continued to perform better than its neighbor New York (42.6%) and all other New England states, including Rhode Island (45.3%) and Massachusetts (49.7%).

Source: U.S. Census Bureau (2020). Response rates | 2020 Census. Retrieved on April 13, 2020 from https://2020census.gov/en/response-rates.html

In Connecticut, there were 5 towns that had self-response rates under 35% on April 13. These included Washington (34.6%), Canaan (34.2%), Sharon (33.9%), Hartford (32.1%), Cornwall (31.3%), and Salisbury (27.3%).

Many of the towns that had the lowest self-response rates are in Litchfield County, which is the county that had the second lowest self-response rate (47.6%) on April 13. Windham County had the lowest self-response rate at 45.7%.

On the other hand, 28 towns had self-response rates at or above 60%. Tolland continued its lead with a self-response rate of 66.6%. Other towns with a high self-response rate included Marlborough (64.3%), Burlington (64.3%), Simsbury (63.4%), and Cheshire (63.1%).

Connecticut’s largest cities continued to have lower response rates than Connecticut’s average. Hartford (32.1%) remained lowest while Fairfield (58.8%) was highest.

Though response rates in many of our cities fell behind the state average, Hartford and Bridgeport, our cities with the lowest response rates, also saw a week-over-week increase that was higher than Connecticut as a whole. Hartford increased by 7.4%, Bridgeport increased by 7.3%, while Connecticut increased by 5.7%.

Connecticut’s cities, as in all states, are at risk of being undercounted, and in turn, risk losing funding that residents need. Each city is made up of census tracts, and response rates vary among these smaller areas. While as a whole New Haven’s self-response rate was 37.3% on April 13, the tract response rates range from a high of 57.4% (tract 14111, the darkest turquoise, below), which is just under the Connecticut average, to a low rate of 25.6% (tract 1402, one of the dark oranges, below). You can explore tracts in your own community using the Census 2020 Response Rate Map or the Census 2020 Hard to Count Map.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau (April 13, 2020). Response Rates. Retrieved April 15, 2020 from https://2020census.gov/en/response-rates.html

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Census & ACSSarah Eisele-DyrliApril 15, 2020