Understanding American Agriculture Challenges for the Agricultural Resource Management Survey (2008) / Chapter Skim
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1 Introduction
1 Introduction
Pages 7-15
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From page 7... ...
Today, the survey is more than an assemblage of several data collections within the National Agricultural Statistics Service. In the mid-1990s, ARMS was created by merging the objectives of two USDA surveys: the Farm Costs and Returns Survey (FCRS)
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From page 8... ...
This definition is common to both the Census of Agriculture and ARMS, and is reflected in the terms "census farms" and "census-defined farms." The definition has been steady for many years and encompasses many small, hard-to-measure businesses, which are difficult to identify and survey. ARMS comprehensively provides observations of field-level farm practices, the economics of farm businesses operating the field (or dairy herd, greenhouse, nursery, poultry house, etc.)
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From page 9... ...
The survey has increased in complexity as it has matured over the years. The current pattern of rotating commodities between survey cycles is one example of a survey design decision that, although made for practical reasons, has tended to increase the complexity of the survey operation.
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From page 10... ...
; • a complex collection scheme implemented under a cooperative agreement by a nonfederal organization; • an ambitious, cognitively challenging survey questionnaire that, despite several efforts at simplification, is perceived by USDA to be so burden some to respondents that pains are currently taken to minimize revisits to them, which limits the ability to longitudinally follow these reporting units; and • a complex estimation and variance computation procedure, which, although appropriate for its purpose, can place limitations on the ability of data analysts to perform multivariate analysis using standard statistical packages and to determine if the analytical result is statistically valid and reliable. CHARGE TO THE PANEL The responsible agencies, the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS)
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From page 11... ...
whether best practices are being used to elicit high-quality responses to the economic and demographic questions, whether the ARMS questions pose major challenges to high-quality responses in that they are sensitive from a privacy perspective and very detailed in their inquiries about resource allocations and economic outcomes for the farm business and the farm household, and the effects of the fact that questions require extended memory recall and family records; 4. whether best practices are being used to elicit economic measures of farm and household performance for the prior year or, in some cases, the previous year; 5.
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From page 12... ...
We consider USDA's choice of statistical procedures for estimating standard errors to test hypotheses with simple estimates and with complex econometric models and make recommendations on best practices for variance estimation and other statistical issues in the use of ARMS data by policy analysts. The types of specific questions that are considered include, for univariate statistics: the appropriate methods for calculating standard errors for use in hypothesis testing; the adequacy of the delete-a-group jackknife variance estimator for calculating standard errors, in general and in small samples; possible improvements to the deletea-group jackknife estimator; and effects of ignoring the survey design in hypothesis testing.
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From page 13... ...
Timeliness, in terms of its influence on relevance, is addressed in Chapter 2, while Chapter 8 discusses timeliness as a factor in overall quality. The accessibility of statistical information refers to the ease with which it can be obtained from the statistical agency.
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From page 14... ...
Along with leaders of several of the largest federal statistical agencies, the administrators of NASS and ERS signed a statement in 2002 delineating federal statistical organizations' guidelines for ensuring and maximizing the quality, utility, objectivity, and integrity of disseminated information. The role of the statistical agency in ensuring quality is summarized in this statement and bears repeating as the underlying theme of this report (U.S.
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From page 15... ...
In these guidelines, quality standards for the various stages of survey operations have been spelled out in some detail. The topics covered range from satisfactory survey response rates to the development of sampling frames to drawing of inferences from the data.
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