Some Methodological Issues in Counting Communities and Households

In this article we discuss some of the limitations of conventional census techniques that assign all individuals to a single household in a single community. In areas with high rates of mobility and where people may belong to several households, traditional census methods can lead to very deceptive results that are poor guides for policy making and the delivery of services. The article suggests some ways census methods could be improved, so they can yield more informative and useful results.