[Babase] Daphne Question - Procedures for Incomplete Censuses

Daphne A Onderdonk (donderdo@Princeton.EDU) babase@www.eco.princeton.edu
Wed, 17 Aug 2005 13:10:50 -0400


Hi all,

The way I dealt with incomplete censuses (as passed on by Jessica) was, for the individuals not marked on the day of the incomplete census, to do my own interpolating on the census sheets, and then enter the census file as if those were real presence/absences.  (On the census sheet itself, I marked the Xs/Os in pencil and made a note that they were interpolated due to an incomplete census.)

As far as how this shows up in Census/Members, it doesn't change much - you're just doing the interpolating instead of the computer.  But it obviously makes some presence/absences look confirmed when they were not, and artificially reduces the number of interpolated days in Members.  But you would lose some information by not including the incomplete censuses at all.  If you're concerned about making these manually interpolated presence/absences look confirmed when they're not, either using demography notes or creating a separate census file with just the confirmed individuals, as you suggested, would take care of that (it would incorporate all the known information without falsely adding information).

I don't know how the way Jessica and I dealt with this issue was decided upon or when, but that's what we did.  I like your ideas better, I think...

Hope all is well with everybody,
Daphne



----- Original Message -----
From: Catherine Markham <amarkham@Princeton.EDU>
Date: Tuesday, August 16, 2005 4:06 pm
Subject: [Babase] Daphne Question - Procedures for Incomplete Censuses

> Hi Daphne,
> 
> Hope things have been going well!  I'm not sure whether or not you 
> still 
> check your Princeton email and/or the listserv messages, but we 
> thought 
> we'd try contacting you this way to get help with a Babase question...
> 
> I'm entering the data for another demography update and the 
> question of 
> incomplete census procedures has come up.  I don't think this is 
> something we talked about last fall (sorry if I've forgotten, 
> though!), 
> perhaps because most censuses in recent years have been complete.
> 
> Jeanne, Susan, Leah, Karl and I have been talking about some 
> different 
> possibilities for how to get the data in the system and we were 
> wondering how you had handled it (or how it was handled before 
> your 
> time, if you know).  Did you use demography notes?  Separate 
> census 
> files specific to a single day and only the individuals with 
> confirmed 
> presences?  Manual entry?
> 
> Thanks for any advice/input you might have!  Give Rico and Shumba 
> our best!!
> 
> Catherine
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