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A surprising degree of uncertainty surrounds one seemingly simple point of fact about the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS): 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. Others claim a longer lifetime for the concepts and questions of the ACS, alternately describing the ACS as dating back to the first decennial census in 1790, which started the precedent of asking for more detail than a simple headcount; to 1940 and the first major use of statistical sampling for some content in a decennial census; or to 1960, the first census in which a full-fledged long-form questionnaire was administered.
As the 2000 census approached, a notion originally advanced in the early 1940s as a possible replacement for the census began to gain traction, albeit as a replacement for the long-form sample rather than the entire census.To secure approval for the full-scale ACS, the ACS was made an integral part of plans for the 2010 decennial census—the basic bargain being that shifting the historical long-form content to the ACS would free the main 2010 census to be conducted as a “short-form only” count. In this spirit, the content and questions of the ACS were closely patterned after the long-form sample questionnaire used in the 2000 census. As years have passed, new questions have gradually been added to the survey.The charge of the workshop
emphasizes the benefits of the ACS and its title retained the wording used at the
project’s inception—literally expressing “burdens” as a parenthetical.
The workshop itself was held on the afternoon of June 14 and the full day of June 15, 2012, at the National Academies’ Keck Center in Washington, DC. The workshop drew roughly 80 attendees across both days, with the first afternoon’s proceedings drawing a particularly strong crowd. Benefits, Burdens, and Prospects of the American Community Survey: Summary of a Workshop explains the happenings of the workshop.
Topics: Behavioral and Social Sciences