Benefits, Burdens, and Prospects of the American Community Survey Summary of a Workshop (2013) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
1 Introduction
1 Introduction
Pages 1-10
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 1... ...
: When did the ACS begin? Some statements cast the ACS as a very new survey -- largely through comparison with the 2010 decennial census, in which the ACS replaced the "long-form" questionnaire administered in previous decades to a sample of respondents.
|
From page 2... ...
In 1981, statistician Leslie Kish proposed mounting a continuous sample survey, creating "rolling" samples by accumulating one or more years of collected data and using those samples to create estimates; the Decade Census Program suggested by Roger Herriot and others in the late 1980s advanced similar notions of using rolling samples for state-level estimates (Herriot et al., 1989)
|
From page 3... ...
.3 Those sample units are contacted by mail during their first month in the sample; in the second month, those who failed to respond by mail are selected for contact/interview by telephone, if a phone number can be determined; in the third month, a subsample of nonrespondents by either mail or phone are then selected for personal interview by Census Bureau field staff. In this way, the Census Bureau is continuously collecting data across all three modes: the data actually collected in month M include mail returns from the new housing units added to the sample in month M , phone interviews with some people from the 1 The Census Bureau archives the questionnaires used in various years of ACS implemen tation on its website at http://www.census.gov/acs/www/methodology/questionnaire_archive/.
|
From page 4... ...
. The Census Bureau intends to implement an Internet response option to the ACS beginning in January 2013, rather than relying solely on return of the mailed paper questionnaire.
|
From page 5... ...
convene a: workshop on the benefits to a broad array of non-federal users of the data products from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS)
|
From page 6... ...
to potentially skeptical audiences. A final example of a broader burden created by the ACS follows directly from its design: Large, populous geographic units have access to a wealth of ACS estimates of 1-, 3-, and 5-year vintages while rural areas and smaller population groups face a relative scarcity of ACS estimates, necessarily waiting for 5-year accumulations that may still have very high standard errors.
|
From page 7... ...
Poe, Census Bureau Director Robert Groves and three ACS data users from the business and economic development 8 Filed on April 15, 2010, the Akin bill -- even under the speediest of circumstances -- could not have applied to the 2010 census, which was then well under way. It would have required placing "on the front of each [questionnaire or survey]
|
From page 8... ...
Shortly thereafter, opponents of the Webster amendment prevailed on the bill managers to vacate the voice vote and instead hold a recorded vote, which produced the 232–190 result. 12 The Senate appropriations subcommittee's mark for the Census Bureau gave the Bureau its full request for FY 2013, including some funds for both the 2010 and 2020 decennial censuses and the 2012 economic census that were trimmed in the House version.
|
From page 9... ...
Likewise, the discussion sessions following topic blocks at the workshop that might -- in different times -- have involved more probing of the challenges or burdens of ACS data in specific applications instead reflected the underlying concerns: What would you do if the ACS had a lower sample size? What, if any, other data sources could you use if the ACS were to go away?
|
From page 10... ...
To close the first afternoon of the workshop, the steering committee sought perspectives from three users in the print and online media; that discussion is in Chapter 4. The core of the second day of the workshop was oriented more around different "sectors" of ACS data users than specific topics; the experiences of state, local, and tribal government users and of business, economic development, and "data aggregator" users are discussed in Chapters 5 and 6, respectively.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.