Benefits, Burdens, and Prospects of the American Community Survey Summary of a Workshop (2013) / Chapter Skim
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6 Business, Economic Development, and Data Aggregator Uses
6 Business, Economic Development, and Data Aggregator Uses
Pages 99-126
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From page 99... ...
Section 6–A summarizes the use of ACS data in the economic development and workforce community, through the specific example of a development group in Iowa. Section 6–B gives an overview of the experiences of one data aggregator -- the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS)
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From page 100... ...
He said that he assisted with workforce analyses completed by and for three counties: the Texoma region of southeast Oklahoma and northeast Texas; the Cedar Valley region of northern Iowa; and the Siouxland region spanning parts of western Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota. These projects provide businesses and employers in the region in question with a picture of the characteristics of the area's workforce and estimates supplies and demands for specific worker types and talents, and they make extensive use of ACS data as well as employment data maintained by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)
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From page 101... ...
He raised as an example a project done principally with two Iowa state agencies -- Iowa Workforce Development (the state employment agency) and the Iowa Economic Development Authority -- along with affiliated regional and local economic development authorities.
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From page 102... ...
and to project and estimate future economic activity and the possible impact of new development strategies. ACS data used in developing this set of metrics included earnings by educational attainment, travel/commute time and means of transportation to work, and income/poverty status, as well as basic demographic splits.
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From page 103... ...
That case involved detailed analysis -- possible only with the ACS -- of 13 census tracts, using the data to try to pick an ideal location based on the demographics of the area and the access to transportation networks (anticipating that much of their clientele would be foot or public transit traffic)
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From page 104... ...
It is not only the ACS that yields this response -- when economic developers are attempting to weave a data-based story for investors, data resources like the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Quarterly Census of Employment of Wages and its Occupational Employment Statistics program also play important roles. But the level of demographic detail from the ACS surprises foreign firms -- which occasions the second "caveat," which is that foreign investors will commonly engage other consultant firms to review the data work by economic developers as a check on whether the numbers are correct.
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From page 105... ...
, are the most widely used of MPC's data resources, and currently have about 30,000 registered users on MPC's website. Speaking for the IPUMS user support team, Genadek remarked that her workshop presentation would be different from the rest of the workshop because she has used ACS data extensively but is not actively in the business of producing anything from the ACS -- "no map, no table, nothing." But the perspective she said she would bring to the session was that of a data aggregator -- repackaging and adding value to the base ACS products and brokering their use by a broader class of data users.
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From page 106... ...
through online queries. Genadek said that she is part of the IPUMS user support team that has proven to be a popular aspect of using the ACS data; she and her small team of colleagues field email and telephone inquiries about the data and using the data, with the goal of responding to all questions within three days (and, more often, within a few hours)
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From page 107... ...
Similar to the graph of MPC data downloads, references to IPUMS and MPC resources in the academic literature began to grow precipitously around 2002 and have increased by roughly 50 percent over the last 3 years, hitting a level of just over 1,100 citations in 2011. As Genadek indicated, the graph includes publications from non-IPUMS data maintained by MPC; however, Genadek said that she believed that the IPUMS versions of ACS products account for a large part of this growth and that the ACS "is driving a lot of this research right now." Using basic information from the user profiles defined on the MPC site, Genadek briefly displayed a pie chart showing the rough breakdown of IPUMS users' backgrounds.
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From page 108... ...
On more technical matters, IPUMS staff commonly field questions about how income variables are adjusted based on the rolling, multiyear sample design; they also receive and address questions about weighting, allocation flags, and variance estimation, as well as more general questions on the interpretation and communication of estimates from multiyear samples. In communication with IPUMS users, Genadek commented that she also has a sense of common wishes -- things that IPUMS users would really like to have included in the ACS.
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From page 109... ...
Questions on the place of birth of mother and father have been absent even longer, having been dropped from the 1980 census long form; the Census Bureau announced plans to add parental place of birth questions to the ACS questionnaire in 2013, but withdrew those plans in May 2012.6 But, Genadek said, much though IPUMS ACS users might appreciate such small revisions, her sense is that the users' main concern and interest is for minimal change in the future. IPUMS users tend to be interested in long, historical time sequences -- for that, one wants continuity in content, form of question, and sample size.
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From page 110... ...
At the Census Bureau, the overriding worry was always content; with Acxiom, a marketing services company, the focus is branding. Putting the point succinctly, Christenson began by saying, "I work for a company called Acxiom" -- and "after this presentation you may not be able to forget that name," as it is "probably the most commonly used word in the presentation." Christenson gave an overview of how ACS products factor into Acxiom's work, but the broader point he alluded to in his opening -- the comparison of a focus on branding with the identity crisis of sorts noted in the media perspectives session (Chapter 4)
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From page 111... ...
• InfoBase List is "our equivalent to the census," as Christenson put it -- it is as complete a roster of "economically active individuals and households" as can be derived from commercial and other records sources, and this is the data resource primarily used for "customer prospecting." • The Market Indices product is a distillation of demographic and economic information that can be queried by Acxiom clients by address -- providing a detailed small-area look at the immediate area surrounding an address -- or directly appended to a client by matching to address. Of these, Market Indices is the most heavily dependent on ACS estimates -- consisting, in present form, of over 500 preprocessed data elements from the ACS, derived for levels of geography ranging from the nation as a whole down to block group.
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From page 112... ...
by Acxiom's consulting organization; distributions of the modeled elements matched to InfoBase List are also compared with distributions of related variables in the PUMS files, as a check on whether the models seem to be working properly. These modeled elements range from demographic characteristics (e.g., educational attainment, length of residence)
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From page 113... ...
6–D ACS IN BUSINESS: UNDERSTANDING TELEWORKING, WAGE INEQUALITY, AND HOUSING Though most people may be familiar with the Conference Board through its highly visible Consumer Confidence Index, Gad Levanon (director of macroeconomic research) emphasized that the Conference Board's analysis and research
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From page 114... ...
Levanon noted that the ACS is a fairly recent discovery for the Conference Board but that it has already factored significantly into several projects; like many other users, awareness of the ACS data -- and the availability of those data in sufficiently fine-grained form -- really came about with the release of the first 5-year ACS estimates and the PUMS files. Like previous speakers, Levanon said that -- prior to the ACS -- his analyses depended heavily on the Current Population Survey (CPS)
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From page 115... ...
codes used in other federal statistical data products. From the experience of working with the occupation variables, Levanon raised an issue for future work and clarification by the Census Bureau -- working to make the occupational codes more comparable over time, because changes in the occupation coding can make it difficult to construct coherent time series.
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From page 116... ...
Levanon said that, as best he knows, the Conference Board's specific analysis of teleworking using the ACS data had not been done before, and he said that the range of interesting kinds of things that can be learned from ACS microdata might spur additional work -- and interest in using the microdata -- among parties new to the data. The second ACS-related Conference Board project that Levanon described is one that is still in progress, but one that again makes use of the ACS's strength in providing consistent measures across a broad range of geography.
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From page 117... ...
') " "#$ % %#$ $ $#$ & &#$ Figure 6-1 Ratio of 90th percentile household income to 10th percentile, by state SOURCES: Calculated from American Community Survey data; adapted from workshop presentation by Gad Levanon.
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From page 118... ...
as bedrooms those rooms you would list if this house, apartment, or mobile home were for sale or rent." 10 Housing Question 1 on the 2012 ACS questionnaire asks about the general nature of the home, asking "Which best describes this building? "; responses include "a one-family house detached from any other house," "a building with 5 to 9 apartments," and "boat, RV, van, etc."
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From page 119... ...
. The way in which ACS data enter this process is that they are crucial for developing the Industry Exposure Database that is a core component of a catastrophe model.
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From page 120... ...
When these elements are combined and then benchmarked against other sources -- data from clients and reports from the insurance industry -- the result is a robust Industry Exposure Database. Hayes said that the decennial census provides requisite information on the number of housing units -- total housing counts.
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From page 121... ...
But, Hayes said, the ACS data provide great assistance -- using the ACS variable on the number of rooms in housing units as proxy for floor area, the same map drawn with ACS data has vastly fewer "no data" holes, and the direct measures can be compared with the ACS-based proxies for areas where they overlap in order to judge the quality of the proxy measurement. In general, Hayes concluded, the ACS is vital to AIR's annual update and maintenance of a robust Industry Exposure Database and, once updated, that database drives a number of important analyses and modeling efforts.
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From page 122... ...
He observed that NAHB has made extensive use of ACS data -- in analyses for its client builder firms to understand the differentiation in housing trends across space. In addition to documenting the effects of the recent economic trends, Crowe said that the ACS has made possible analyses of important aspects of the broader real estate industry, and he offered two specific examples.
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From page 123... ...
Reiterating that the basic nature of economic development projects is telling a story with a variety of data sources, he said that he commonly uses the county-to-county migration data developed by the Internal Revenue Service based on annual tax returns and -- specific to mobility within labor market areas -- data from the Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program.
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From page 124... ...
Crowe agreed that intensive data users know the ACS very well but that he is not surprised that end-stream clients of business users or data aggregators are not fully aware of the ACS. He said that the challenge, and the point that he wanted to raise in starting the line of questioning, is that if people do not know that "the ACS" is a valuable piece of information, "they will never come to the defense of it" if the survey is vulnerable.
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From page 125... ...
Roderick Little (U.S. Census Bureau)
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From page 126... ...
126 BENEFITS, BURDENS, AND PROSPECTS OF THE AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY sults: that voluntary response would cause mail response to decrease considerably, meaning that either additional funding would be needed to get back to the current effective sample size or data might have serious issues concerning bias and representativeness.
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