Thanks for the brief Chuck and the links.
This is a Wow. Especially when we know the Bureau reports a weighted
response rate which as I understand it does not include those households
who got the ACS mailing and did not respond by mail or online, and were
not contacted with a personal visit. (
http://www.trb.org/Publications/Blurbs/156802.aspx page 22.). Tells me
we are going to have to look very carefully at our data and check for
weirdness as we start to see it. Overall, though I think we are pretty
good with our data once we know where all the warts are.
On 8/2/2021 5:16 PM, Charles Purvis wrote:
I’m still trying to understand what’s going on with
the year 2020
American Community Survey (ACS). I went through the Friday, 7/29/21,
PDF of the Census Bureau’s powerpoint presentation.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-kits/2021/impact-pandemic-2020-acs-1-…
<https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-kits/2021/impact-pandemic-2020-acs-1-year.html>
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/newsroom/press-kits/2021/acs-1-ye…
<https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/newsroom/press-kits/2021/acs-1-year/20210729-presentation-changes-acs-1-year.pdf>
Census had this to say about “non-response”
*
All surveys typically have some nonresponse bias because those who
do not respond tend to be different from those who do respond
*
Our standard methods for mitigating the nonresponse bias are
insufficient for this data year
*
The 2020 ACS data collection had the lowest response rate ever for
the survey at 71%, down from 86% in 2019
and 92% in 2018
o
This rate is an average across the entire data collection year
o
Response rates during the peak pandemic months [March-June
2020] were significantly lower
The big “wow” is the decline in the “non-response rate” from
86 percent in 2019 to 71 percent in 2020. Of course, my
followup question is does this mean that 29 percent of
respondents provided “incomplete data” that required their
information to be edited / imputed / allocated? Or does it
mean that 29 percent of respondents were “totally nonrespondent.”
Unfortunately, the 29 percent is “totally nonrespondent”.
Here’s the Census Bureau page that shows overall response
rates in the ACS from 2005 to 2019, that is, NO useful
information (?) from the selected sample. I think.
https://www.census.gov/acs/www/methodology/sample-size-and-data-quality/res…
<https://www.census.gov/acs/www/methodology/sample-size-and-data-quality/response-rates/>
This table is also amazing to show that the “Best” year for
the ACS, in terms of response rates, was 2009, at 98.0
percent response rate.
These are nonresponse rates for the American Community Survey,
not the decennial (the “short form”) Census.
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