With the start of 2020 comes the opening curtain for the 2020 Census. The first enumeration will take place in Toksook Bay, Alaska on January 21, 2020. Starting mid-March, 95% of U.S. households will receive their initial letter informing them about the census and – for the first time – offering them an opportunity to complete it online. The balance of households will have an invitation and/or paper questionnaire delivered to them by a census representative, with only a small number (<1%) designated to be counted directly by an enumerator.

On January 14, the Census Bureau will preview the 2020 Census advertising campaign, including more than 1,000 advertisements developed in English and 12 other languages to build awareness and encourage participation in the census across the diverse range of communities living in the U.S.

ADDP-SO is playing its part in the 2020 Census by managing the field operations for the Post-Enumeration Survey (PES). Comprised of five sequential operations that follow behind each of the key census operations, the PES provides a crucial assessment of the quality of the census. By having ADDP-SO manage these operations within the current survey structure, the Census Bureau will preserve an important degree of independence from the census itself. As PES ramps down, ADDP-SO and Field will benefit from transitioning high-performing Field Representatives from among the approximately 13,000 field staff hired for PES to assignments on other current surveys.

While we support our Census Bureau colleagues who are working tirelessly to conduct a successful census this year, we are already looking to the decade ahead. Data collection continues to face challenges as respondent participation decreases and costs rise in part to mitigate declining response. This past year ADDP-SO has engaged more intensively with the American Community Survey Office (ACSO) to leverage its investment in methods research, including introducing a number of improvements in the look, feel and messaging of our respondent communications. Late this year, we had the opportunity to participate in two ACSO’s expert panel consults held by the National Academy of Sciences. These sessions yielded recommendations focused on improving the respondent experience with the ACSO internet instrument, and tailoring materials to resonate with diverse sectors of the population, including in rural areas. As we head into 2020, we look forward to sharing some of these ideas where they may benefit your surveys.

The Census Bureau is privileged to work in support of your agency and others to conduct some of the nation’s most important surveys. As we enter this new decade, we seek to work with you in thinking strategically about whether the data we produce continue to meet users’ needs; how we overcome the challenges of collecting data directly from respondents; and how we protect data while balancing quality and confidentiality. These are thorny questions, but this community has already begun to grapple with them:

Recognizing that the Telephone Point of Purchase Survey was no longer viable as a Random Digit Dial telephone survey, the Bureau of Labor Statistics worked aggressively to integrate the collection of point-of-purchase data into the Consumer Expenditure Survey.
The New York City Department of Housing Development and Preservation had put forward a significant investment in redesigning the NYC Housing Vacancy Survey for launch in October 2020. (See also “Advance Translation Techniques Used for the 2021 New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey” below.)
In 2017, the Census Bureau launched an exploration leveraging Census data and electronic health records for statistical purposes that provide insights into the social determinants of health. This effort has matured into a research program involving Federal and academic partners invested in creating new data to answer these questions. (See “Enhancing Health Data (EHealth) Initiative” below.)
As climate change and residential expansion have increased the potential for wildfires that affect residential areas, HUD is responding to data needs articulated by the National Fire Protection Association to analyze housing characteristics that increase wildfire vulnerability. A new module to the American Housing Survey is under design to evaluate the extent to which these characteristics exist in the relevant housing stock.
A redesigned National Health Interview Survey launched into production in the last year, after the National Center for Health Statistics balanced two competing demands: increasing NHIS respondent burden and stakeholder desires for more – and more nuanced – data. The introduction of an innovative “quilt” of rotating modules addressed both needs.
The 2018 National Sampled Survey of Registered Nurses (NSSRN) emerged from a comprehensive effort by the National Center for Health Workforce Analysis that included questionnaire changes that reflecting data needs in a changing health care system, integrated content from a second survey of Nurse Practitioners, and introduced improvements to the overall sampling and survey design.
The National Center for Education Statistics sponsored a number of experiments to ease the burden on schools participating in the National Teacher Principal Survey (NTPS). These efforts include using vendor-purchased teacher data to populate Teacher Listing Forms; for the 2020-21 NTPS, this vendor information will be loaded into the NTPS portal and schools will simply need to review and verify the information, rather than provide it wholesale. New incentives tailored to school staff and teachers will include the deployment of popcorn bins and tote bags via the National Processing Center.
The Census Open Innovation Lab (COIL) team has actively engaged the data community via The Opportunity Project, challenging them to leverage existing data to create new digital tools of use to individuals and communities.

These innovations are a great start. Together we can push further: How will the way we produce data look different in 2030 than it does now? How will our users’ need for data change? Do we continue to work on ways to overcome respondent reluctance, or look for opportunities to supplement or replace key data points without added burden – or both? And can we transition seamlessly to a new design, or do we sustain a break in series? The answers to these questions are as varied as the number of surveys we support, but they are worthy of exploration.

A last word about the 2020 Census: if you have relatives, colleagues or friends who would relish making a (paid!) contribution to our nation’s greatest civic endeavor, please encourage them to consider a job as an enumerator, field supervisor or an Area Census Office staffer. There are still jobs available, and applying takes only a few minutes: www.2020census.gov/jobs and www.usajobs.gov (keyword search: Census Bureau).

And of course…complete your census!

Eldercare Research Using American Time Use Survey (ATUS) Data

by Beth Capps, Assistant Survey Director, American Time Use Survey

The American Time Use Survey (ATUS) is a continuous household survey that provides nationally representative estimates of how, where and with whom Americans, age 15 and over, spend their time. Questions about eldercare providers and the time they spend providing care were added to the ATUS in 2011. Data from the ATUS fills the need for quality data on eldercare and how it affects caregiver’s lives as the U.S. population ages.

Eldercare providers are defined as individuals who provide unpaid care to someone age 65 or older who needs help because of a condition related to aging. Eldercare includes such tasks as assistance with personal care, transportation, household tasks and providing companionship.

According to the 2017-2018 Unpaid Eldercare news release from November 2019:

Sixteen percent of the civilian non-institutional population age 15 and over (40.4 million people) provide unpaid eldercare. About one fourth of eldercare providers engage in unpaid eldercare on a given day, spending an average of 3.4 hours providing this care.
Individuals ages 55 to 64 were the most likely to provide eldercare.
Thirty-nine percent of eldercare providers cared for someone age 85 or older. Thirteen percent provided care for someone age 65 to 69.
Compared with caregivers who were younger and older, eldercare providers ages 15 to 34 were more likely to care for a grandparent and those ages 35 to 64 were more likely to care for a parent.
Eighty-two percent of eldercare providers who were parents themselves were employed, and 69 percent were employed full time.
Almost half of eldercare providers who were parents of children living at home provided care for their own parent.

For more information about the characteristics of eldercare providers, please refer to the Bureau of Labor Statistics news release ‘Unpaid Eldercare in the United States – 2017-2018 Summary’ https://www.bls.gov/news.release/elcare.nr0.htm.

Advance Translation Techniques Used for the 2021 New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey

by Tamara Cole, Survey Director, Housing Surveys Team

The New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey (NYCHVS) is sponsored by the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development and has been administered by the U.S. Census Bureau since 1965. The survey is conducted in years ending in 1, 4, and 7, and is collected via personal interview by field representatives for a sample of housing units in New York City.

The NYCHVS collects information on housing supply and housing quality; data from the NYCHVS are vital to rent regulation in New York City. The survey covers a variety of topics, including housing unit characteristics and demographics of the people living in the household.

In 2021, a redesigned NYCHVS will be fielded with two major changes: 1) the survey will be adapted from a paper questionnaire to a Blaise laptop instrument (CAPI), and 2) the survey questionnaire will be available in the following languages: English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Bengali and Haitian-Creole. Written Chinese will be available in both traditional and simplified characters. Spoken Chinese will be available in both Mandarin and Cantonese.

To ensure a linguistically and culturally appropriate translation of the NCYHVS instrument, the sponsor and survey team used a technique called “Advance Translation.” Advance translation is a procedure used by major surveys like the European Social Survey to aim for more parallel meaning across languages by completing a preliminary translation to identify problems. It has the advantage of pointing out potential problems with source text before the source text is finalized so that modification can occur in both source and translated versions.

For this project, two translators per language independently translated a first version of the English survey questionnaire. Each translator produced an initial draft translation that was used to identify places in the English source text that are difficult to translate. After conducting the first translation, translators coded each question for potential translation difficulties, such as cultural differences across languages, a grammar or syntax problem, or unclear source text or meaning. The information provided by each translator was synthesized by survey methodologists and each language team met as a group with the survey methodologists and subject matter experts (SMEs) to discuss their concerns and recommendations. The survey methodologists and SMEs revised the English source text when needed based on these recommendations. A new English source version was sent back to the language teams so that they could review to ensure that revised questions can be translated in a linguistically and culturally appropriate way.

The survey will kick off data collection in November 2020, with bi-lingual FRs using these translations. First results from the 2021 survey will be available in the first quarter of 2022.

Enhancing Health Data (EHealth) Initiative

By Victoria Udalova, Research Economist, Center for Economic Studies; and Lucinda Dalzell, Survey Director, National Ambulatory Medical Care Surveys

It’s been several years since we provided an update on Census’ efforts to acquire electronic health records (EHR). We’ve just reached a major milestone in this project, so it’s an appropriate time to report on our activities! The Census Bureau has begun a pioneering new partnership with the state of Utah’s Department of Health (UDOH). The vision for this partnership emerged from a meeting hosted by the Census Bureau in April 2017 to explore how existing data could be used in new ways to support insights into the social determinants of health. At the meeting were representatives from organizations such as state health departments, state and regional Health Information Exchanges (HIEs), the Department of Health and Humans Services’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), and the Census Bureau.

Collectively, we recognized the potential for matching data collected by the Census Bureau with clinical health data to improve the understanding of the socioeconomic dynamics that impact health. We discussed variables available through Census Bureau data, including race and ethnicity, household composition, generational dynamics, income, insurance status, education, transportation, housing, participation in safety-net programs, and others. We were encouraged by the level of interest and the prospects for creating data products that support research in this area. The Census Bureau committed funding from its Innovation and Operational Efficiency Program to seed initial efforts. Once the initial 3-year funding ended, the Census Bureau extended funding for an additional year deeming this initiative among the top priority areas at the Bureau.

As part of this initiative, we aim to develop working relationships and obtain clinical health data from stakeholders; process and link health data to Census-maintained datasets; increase institutional knowledge pertaining to emerging data sources; and finally, assess organizational strengths, weaknesses, costs, and opportunities to obtain and process health data.

Shortly after the initial meeting in April 2017, representatives from Utah’s Department of Health and the Census Bureau began to build a new partnership. Together we have worked through legal, policy, and security requirements and have succeeded in negotiating a tightly scoped exploratory project focused on the link between demographic, social, economic and housing factors and emergency department visits in Utah to reduce preventable or avoidable emergency department (ED) utilization. The findings from this collaborative project will inform efforts to reduce costs related to ED visits for non-emergent issues and will improve our understanding of the role the broader context of people’s lives plays in health outcomes. To meet this objective, we entered into a data-sharing agreement, enabling the Census Bureau to bring over and link select variables from Utah’s identified ED encounter data to the American Community Survey (ACS).

In addition to examining social determinants of ED visits, we will also evaluate the ED data by making comparisons to the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NHAMCS) data files. Currently, the Census Bureau is the collecting agent for NHAMCS on behalf of the National Center for Health Statistics. We look forward to updating you on findings from this research in upcoming issues of Survey News!

Contact Strategy Experiment for the 2019 National Household Education Survey

by Beth Newman and Joshua Neufelder

Background

The National Household Education Survey (NHES) is sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) under the U.S. Department of Education, and provides descriptive data on the educational activities of the U.S. population. It offers researchers, educators, and policymakers a variety of statistics on the condition of education in the United States. NHES data can be used by the Department of Education to learn about early child care and education from households.

In 2019, the NHES included several experiments to evaluate the impact of adding differing contact materials and data collection methodologies. The primary purpose of these experiments was to evaluate whether different contact strategies, modes of collection, and incentive protocols could stop or reverse the trend of declining response rates observed in the 2016 NHES.

Data collection for the 2019 NHES began in January 2019 with a follow-up operation continuing through September 2019. A two-phase, stratified sample design of 205,000 addresses was selected from an address-based sample frame using the United States Postal Service Computerized Delivery Sequence File (Wan, Jackson, Battle, McPhee, & Guarino, 2018). Response to a screener determined eligibility for the two topical surveys for 2019, Parent and Family Involvement in Education (PFI) and Early Childhood Program Participation (ECPP). If eligible, a household received one of the two topical surveys based on the makeup of individuals in the home.

The 2019 NHES experiments vary in the aspects of data collection they address. Table 1 provides a brief summary of each of the experimental groups.

Additionally, NCES conducted a test to investigate if there is evidence of order bias in responses to three survey items. For the PFI topical survey, three item response options were randomized in five to six different orders to detect the possibility of order bias.

Methodology and Research Questions

In general, offering incentives and targeting sample units with certain data collection modes and contact materials can reduce costs, increase response, and improve sample representativeness. These designs can also influence how and which sample cases respond. Understanding the results of NHES: 2019 experiments will shape preliminary decision-making about the overall design of NHES: 2022, such as modes to offer and experiments to consider as well as versions of questions to use (in the case of the randomized response order experiments).

The Demographic Statistical Methods Division (DSMD) Survey Methodology team are currently conducting a number of preliminary analyses projects for NHES: 2019, based on the design summarized earlier. Specifically, they will:

Examine response rates (overall and component), responding household characteristics, and demand for certain response modes by household characteristic.
Examine whether the randomized display order had an effect on response distributions.
Analyze the characteristics of respondents who called the TQA line and completed a screener and/or topical survey with an interviewer rather than using a self-administered paper or web mode.
Conduct analyses of web paradata related to breakoff rates in order to understand whether certain questionnaire items are problematic on the web.

The goal of DSMD’s analyses is to provide timely, high-level results on experiments and challenges in the data collection operation so that NCES and Census can improve the instruments and develop the optimal survey design for the next NHES collection in 2022.

DSMD’s analyses are currently ongoing, and results are forthcoming.

References

Wan, C., Jackson, M., Battle, D., McPhee, C., & Guarino, N. (2018). National Household Education Surveys (NHES):2019 Sampling Plan. American Institutes for Research.

Articles/Blogs from Census Internet

More Children Live With Half Siblings Than Previously Thought – The redesigned Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) (2014) provides a more accurate and detailed picture of siblings – particularly half siblings. It’s not uncommon for children to live with siblings who share just one biological parent. In fact, one in six children under 18 live with a half sibling.

U.S. Census Bureau Releases 2020 Census Response Rate Challenge Toolkit – The new toolkit encourages leaders to challenge their communities to improve upon their 2010 Census response rates in the upcoming national census.

Census Statistics Used to Plan Healthy Food Programs for Low Income Households – Federal, state and local officials will use 2020 Census Data to help plan funding for nutrition programs for the next decade.

Census Bureau’s Innovated LEHD Program on Local Workforce Dynamics Turns 20 – The LEHD program began as a small startup. It grew into regularly published national statistics on worker and job flows at no cost to state partners.

American Community Survey 2014-2018 5-Year Estimates Available – As part of the nationwide release of over 40 demographic topics, estimates profiling the 65 and older population are now available. Of the 3,142 counties in the United States, Sumter County, Fla., had the highest percentage of residents aged 65 and older—at 55.6% in 2014-2018. This is significantly higher than the percentage in 2009-2013 (46.7%).

It Takes Extra Effort by the U.S. Census Bureau to Reach People Far Outside Urban Areas – Extraordinary measures are taken to reach homes that are difficult to access in rural and remote areas, whether they are located at the top of a mountain or at the end of a mile-long gravel drive. Often, rural households do not have typical mailing addresses but use post office boxes in towns. “Update Leave” and “Update Enumerate” are special operations that locate and count these populations for the 2020 Census.