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Comment by jestar_jokin | Hacker News Reader

Except you may have step-children, adopted children, foster children, children in the house not part of your family (friends of your child, children of your friends), etc. Keep in mind that the census needs to include everyone who was in the house at the time it was filled out, not everyone who is part of your regular abode/family situation.

You might argue that it would work for the "most common scenario". In which case why not pre-fill all the data to the statistically most common values? (Hint: the census's purpose is to collect those statistics.)

Also, pre-filling might cause confusion as to which fields have already been filled out by the user; if a value is present, they might wrongly assume no action is required on their part.

(Having said all that, I haven't seen the online census.)

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Sure. I did consider the scenario if the kids had a friend sleeping over that night or something, or if the respondents had adoptive or foster children etc., but I think when I traced back the line of questioning in my case there seemed to be a logical thread link there that could/should have negated asking for the same information again.

I am relying on my memory here from few months ago, so I could be wrong, but I did feel at several points during the session that quite a few questions could quite possibly be chained together in better fashion. Perhaps not so much a failing of the actual site UX designer, but the census analysts who designed the questions in the first place?

Not responsible for this census, but I've done work with it in the past. Two observations:

The questions are largely derivative and the same each year: cost to develop and test while maintaining statistical validity and capture of all possible scenarios, while still being interpreted correctly by the population, is enormous.

Secondly, the number of permutations and combinations of answers is almost universally underestimated by everyone I've ever met outside of this process. Nationality is not the same as birthplace is not the same as parent is not the same as adults in the household. The amount of diversity is staggering.

Additionally, although those two are the primary reasons for the question designs (and I assure you, people will be doing deductions and logical inferences on the back-end once the data is collected), being exhaustive at the point of data entry rather than deductive allows for further meta analysis on the data entry process and survey responding experience itself, whereas if you decide to attempt to deduce, you miss out on a dimension of typo, misskey, misinterpretation, and other analysis data that you would forgo in the former case.

Thanks for your viewpoint from the 'sausage factory', so to speak. I am beginning to understand the enormity of trying to combine ease of use, with the effort to gather statistically valid data.

It's kind of the same thing when people assume that you only need a simple data structure for representing a family tree.

UX wise, a radio button that hides that section labelled "same as John Doe" might have given that flexibility without the pain of rewriting a dozen things again.

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