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D’Vera Cohn

Former Senior Writer/Editor

Expertise:Demographics and Social Trends, Hispanic Trends

D’Vera Cohn is a senior writer and editor at Pew Research Center. She studies and writes about demographics in the United States, especially the census. Cohn was a Washington Post reporter for 21 years, mainly writing about demographics, and was the newspaper’s lead reporter for the 2000 census. Before joining Pew Research Center, she served as a consultant and freelance writer for the Brookings Institution and Population Reference Bureau. Cohn is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and is a former Nieman Fellow. She is an author of studies on the marriage and birth rates in the United States, migration between the U.S. and Mexico, and U.S. population projections. Cohn manages Pew Research Center’s @allthingscensus Twitter account. She has spoken at national journalism conferences about how reporters can make use of demographic data in stories and often talks about the Center’s findings in print and broadcast media.

Publications

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    New York Prisoners and the Census

    New York legislators have passed a bill that would count prisoners at their home addresses, not those where they are incarcerated, for purposes of redrawing state and local legislative districts using data from the 2010 Census next year.

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    Text-Messaging Plays Big Role in Indonesian Census

    Indonesia, the world’s fourth-largest country, is taking a census this year, as it does each decade. Conducted in May, it relied heavily on text-messaging to convey data from enumerators in the field to their supervisors at central headquarters. According to a report on the Population Reference Bureau website, these day-by-day reports helped census officials monitor […]

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    Other Ways to Conduct a Census

    The Wall Street Journal’s “The Numbers Guy” columnist, Carl Bialik, has weighed in on the debate over whether Americans should be required by law to fill in their census forms, and whether there are other ways to take the census.

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    Divergent World Population Trends

    The Population Reference Bureau released its 2010 World Population Data Sheet today, focusing on the theme of divergent demographics in developed and developing nations.

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    Federal Funding and the American Community Survey

    Data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey help guide the distribution of 29% of federal domestic assistance spending and 69% of federal grant spending, according to a new Brookings Institution report.

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    United Kingdom May Drop Traditional Census

    The United Kingdom will conduct a traditional census next year, but it may be the last of its kind, according to the British Cabinet minister in charge of the count. Francis Maude told the Daily Telegraph newspaper that there are ways to “provide better, quickerinformation, more frequently and cheaper.” Britain has conducted a census each […]

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    Canada’s Chief Statistician Quits Over Census Changes

    The head of Statistics Canada has resigned over the government’s decision to drop the mandatory long form in the 2011 Census, stating that the voluntary survey that will be instituted in its place is not an adequate substitute. The resignation statement by Munir A. Sheikh declined to explain what advice he and his agency gave […]

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    Census 2010: Quality Indicators Thus Far

    As the 2010 Census information-gathering phase winds down and the Census Bureau turns to quality-checking and data-processing, Director Robert Groves offered some statistics at a recent operational briefing to assess how the national count has gone thus far.