ANN ARBOR—The University of Michigan has launched a contest aimed at increasing student participation in the 2010 census.

The contest, sponsored by the U-M Office of the Provost and the U-M Institute for Social Research, offers $3,000 in prizes for short videos designed to spur student participation in the coming census. Details are available on the contest Web site: http://census.umich.edu.

“Videos are a great way to get across the important message that for college and university students, their census residence is their dorm, apartment, or rented housing, not their parents’ home,” said ISR Director James S. Jackson.

Historically, student neighborhoods in Ann Arbor and other college towns have some of the worst mail response rates for census forms. This can result in lower population counts for affected cities, counties, and states, lower funding from federal agencies, and less representation in state and federal governments.

Contest organizers hope the video contest will inspire U-M students to get the message across to peers that college students count. The videos will be available on YouTube and U-M websites. They will also be available to area television stations and other colleges and universities.

Jackson says the video ad contest provides a way to support the outreach efforts of U.S. Census Bureau, directed by Robert Groves, former director of the ISR Survey Research Center. Census forms are scheduled to be mailed to university and college students starting in March.

Among the messages contest organizers hope the videos will convey:

• A student’s census residence is where they live and sleep most of the time as of April 1, 2010, not their parents’ home.
• Students who are graduating and planning to leave the city, state or country where they go to school should still fill out the census form sent to their campus-area residence.
• Students who are not U.S. citizens should complete and mail back the census forms they receive while at school.
• Everyone in a student’s household should be listed on the census forms as long as they have no other usual place of residence.
• It doesn’t matter who is listed as “head of household;” what matters is that everyone is counted, just once.
• Census information is confidential and never shared with other government agencies, or with parents, who may not know about student living arrangements or roommates.
• Parents of college students who live away from home during the academic year should not list students as household members on parental census forms.

“We’re confident that U-M students will be able to get these key messages across in a way that is both accurate and creative,” says Jackson.

The deadline for video contest entries is Monday, March 8, 2010. For information on entering a video and judging criteria, visit the contest Web site: http://census.umich.edu.

Established in 1949, the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR) is the world’s largest academic social science survey and research organization, and a world leader in developing and applying social science methodology, and in educating researchers and students from around the world. ISR conducts some of the most widely-cited studies in the nation, including the Reuters/University of Michigan Survey of Consumer Attitudes, the American National Election Studies, the Monitoring the Future Study, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the Health and Retirement Study, the Columbia County Longitudinal Study and the National Survey of Black Americans. ISR researchers also collaborate with social scientists in more than 60 nations on the World Values Surveys and other projects, and the Institute has established formal ties with universities in Poland, China, and South Africa. ISR is also home to the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the world’s largest digital social science data archive. Visit the ISR Web site at http://www.isr.umich.edu for more information.

Contest website