The American Community Survey (ACS) is one of three program components required to achieve the 2010 Census reengineering strategy goals. The ACS replaces the Census Sample, the once-a-decade collection of detailed social, economic, and housing characteristics for demographic groups, that occurs as part of the decennial census, with an ongoing survey that produces annual and multi-year estimates of these same characteristics.

The Census 2000 Supplementary Survey (C2SS) was conducted as part of Census 2000 to demonstrate the operational feasibility of ACS methods. To date reports have been issued addressing questions of conducting the ACS coincident with the decennial census, technical performance, the implications of changing the ACS to a voluntary survey, and comparisons of general demographic and economic characteristics to Census 2000 results.

In this report, we compare C2SS estimates to those produced by the Census 2000 Sample for selected social characteristics to look for substantive differences, possible explanations, and supporting evidence about which is likely to be better in the event we find differences. Specifically, the report includes comparisons of the social profile characteristics for:

• School enrollment;
• Educational attainment;
• Marital status;
• Grandparents as caregivers;
• Veteran status;
• Disability;
• Place of birth, citizenship status, and region of birth;
• Language spoken at home; and
• Ancestry.

We produced this report to help educate users of these social data and ease the transition from the decennial census sample estimates to the ACS estimates.