How did a soon-to-be graduate student interested in studying record linkage get involved with the research at the Census Bureau? For me, it was Coding it Forward’s Civic Digital Fellowship (CDF). A first-of-its-kind program, CDF opens a pipeline into public sector work for students in technology-related fields. When CDF started in 2017, the Census Bureau was its founding agency partner, with 14 fellows from 11 universities; this summer, the Census Bureau welcomed its third and largest cohort of fellows — 20 students from 17 universities.

All of us share an interest in the intersection of technology and governance, as well as a passion for public service. Fellows are making their mark at the Census Bureau working on projects ranging from applying machine-learning techniques on public data (to predict NAICS codes for the Economic Census) to implementing formally private algorithms to be used by researchers in future disclosure avoidance practice.

For me, the CDF experience translates into studying response omissions by examining differences in individual nonresponse at the household level across multiple data sources. In particular, I link records and investigate how decisions made in the linkage phase — including choice of blocking schema, field agreement/disagreement probability parameters, and classification score threshold — impact source coverage distributions.

This work contributes to downstream household demographic and economic analyses, allowing for the comparison of households with a composition discrepancy across the data sources (i.e., an individual appears in one data source, but not the other) against those without such gaps. My linkage work enhances the Census Bureau’s probabilistic matching of record information by using a broader set of observations to inform conclusions and a more complete universe of data to generate household and person statistics.

Working on this project gives me the opportunity to think and learn alongside some of the leading researchers in this field and to contribute to current discussions about the future of record linkage research and practice at the Census Bureau. It also gives me the chance to interact with researchers, working both upstream and downstream, helping me understand the importance of this work and how record linkage fits into the Census Bureau’s broader statistical analysis pipeline. I have no doubt my fellow fellows have had similar opportunities in their respective project areas.