IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/kap/poprpr/v25y2006i3p257-273.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

An evaluation of the American Community Survey: results from the Oregon test site

Author

Listed:
  • George Hough
  • David Swanson

Abstract

The American Community Survey (ACS) is a Census Bureau product designed to provide accurate and timely demographic and economic indicators on an annual basis for both large and small geographic areas within the United States. Operational plans for Census 2010 call for ACS to replace the decennial census long form (Census LF), pending the results of evaluation studies. This plan represents a major change in that variables that traditionally have been collected on a “snapshot” basis once every 10 years would be collected on a “rolling” annual basis. Using a loss function analysis and other tools, this paper reports preliminary findings from a comparison of ACS and Census 2000 results in Multnomah County, Oregon, one of five national “local expert” test sites set up to compare ACS data collected at the time of Census 2000. The preliminary findings suggest that there are notable differences between some of the corresponding variables found in the ACS and Census LF that require more detailed examination. For example, the loss function analysis reveals notable differences for race and disability variables. In other comparisons of corresponding variables between ACS and Census 2000, differences are found within each of the four major areas of interest: (1) demographic characteristics, (2) social characteristics, (3) economic characteristics, and (4) housing characteristics, with housing characteristics showing the least similarity overall. These results also suggest that more detailed examinations are needed to understand differences between corresponding variables collected by ACS and the Census LF. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2006

Suggested Citation

  • George Hough & David Swanson, 2006. "An evaluation of the American Community Survey: results from the Oregon test site," Population Research and Policy Review, Springer;Southern Demographic Association (SDA), vol. 25(3), pages 257-273, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:kap:poprpr:v:25:y:2006:i:3:p:257-273
    DOI: 10.1007/s11113-006-0007-1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11113-006-0007-1
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s11113-006-0007-1?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. David Swanson & Jeff Tayman & Charles Barr, 2000. "A note on the measurement of accuracy for subnational demographic estimates," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 37(2), pages 193-201, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. David Swanson & George Hough, 2012. "An Evaluation of Persons per Household (PPH) Estimates Generated by the American Community Survey: A Demographic Perspective," Population Research and Policy Review, Springer;Southern Demographic Association (SDA), vol. 31(2), pages 235-266, April.
    2. Katherine Nesse & Mallory Rahe, 2015. "Conflicts in the Use of the ACS by Federal Agencies Between Statutory Requirements and Survey Methodology," Population Research and Policy Review, Springer;Southern Demographic Association (SDA), vol. 34(4), pages 461-480, August.
    3. Lee, Min-Ah, 2011. "Disparity in disability between native-born non-Hispanic white and foreign-born Asian older adults in the United States: Effects of educational attainment and age at immigration," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 72(8), pages 1249-1257, April.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Herman O. Stekler, 2008. "Evaluating Consensus Forecasts," Working Papers 2008-007, The George Washington University, Department of Economics, H. O. Stekler Research Program on Forecasting.
    2. Meng Xu & Helge Brunborg & Joel E. Cohen, 2017. "Evaluating multi-regional population projections with Taylor’s law of mean–variance scaling and its generalisation," Journal of Population Research, Springer, vol. 34(1), pages 79-99, March.
    3. Kim, Sungil & Kim, Heeyoung, 2016. "A new metric of absolute percentage error for intermittent demand forecasts," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 32(3), pages 669-679.
    4. David A. Swanson, 2015. "On the Relationship among Values of the Same Summary Measure of Error when it is used across Multiple Characteristics at the Same Point in Time: An Examination of MALPE and MAPE," Review of Economics & Finance, Better Advances Press, Canada, vol. 5, pages 1-14, August.
    5. Stefan Rayer, 2007. "Population forecast accuracy: does the choice of summary measure of error matter?," Population Research and Policy Review, Springer;Southern Demographic Association (SDA), vol. 26(2), pages 163-184, April.
    6. Ji Wu & Xian Cheng & Stephen Shaoyi Liao, 2020. "Tourism forecast combination using the stochastic frontier analysis technique," Tourism Economics, , vol. 26(7), pages 1086-1107, November.
    7. Spiliotis, Evangelos & Nikolopoulos, Konstantinos & Assimakopoulos, Vassilios, 2019. "Tales from tails: On the empirical distributions of forecasting errors and their implication to risk," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 35(2), pages 687-698.
    8. David A. Swanson & Jeff Tayman & T.M. Bryan, 2018. "A Note on Rescaling the Arithmetic Mean for Right-skewed Positive Distributions," Review of Economics & Finance, Better Advances Press, Canada, vol. 14, pages 17-24, November.
    9. Louie Ren & Yong Glasure, 2009. "Applicability of the Revised Mean Absolute Percentage Errors (MAPE) Approach to Some Popular Normal and Non-normal Independent Time Series," International Advances in Economic Research, Springer;International Atlantic Economic Society, vol. 15(4), pages 409-420, November.
    10. David Swanson & George Hough, 2012. "An Evaluation of Persons per Household (PPH) Estimates Generated by the American Community Survey: A Demographic Perspective," Population Research and Policy Review, Springer;Southern Demographic Association (SDA), vol. 31(2), pages 235-266, April.
    11. Hyndman, Rob J. & Koehler, Anne B., 2006. "Another look at measures of forecast accuracy," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 22(4), pages 679-688.
    12. Takahiro Yoshida & Daisuke Murakami & Hajime Seya, 2024. "Spatial Prediction of Apartment Rent using Regression-Based and Machine Learning-Based Approaches with a Large Dataset," The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Springer, vol. 69(1), pages 1-28, July.
    13. Jack Baker & David Swanson & Jeff Tayman, 2023. "Boosted Regression Trees for Small-Area Population Forecasting," Population Research and Policy Review, Springer;Southern Demographic Association (SDA), vol. 42(4), pages 1-24, August.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kap:poprpr:v:25:y:2006:i:3:p:257-273. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.