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–8–
The Burdens of the ACS, and
Closing Discussion
As described in Section 1–A, the Workshop on the Benefits (and Burdens)
of the American Community Survey (ACS) sought to emphasize the benefits
of the ACS to a wide array of data users while also giving its burdens—its chal-
lenges and drawbacks—an honest and appropriate airing. The workshop presen-
tations and discussions summarized in previous chapters reflect different aspects
of burden, including the relative disadvantage rural areas confront in access to
and accuracy of ACS estimates compared to more populous areas (Sections 5–B
and 6–A), questions and concepts that do not completely mesh with pressing
policy interests (Section 2–A), and restrictive data embargo protocols that can
hinder the work of groups serving as “interpreters” of the data (Section 3–B). In
addition to burden-related material in these and other individual presentations,
the workshop steering committee devoted a separate session to issues of bur-
den, assembling a small group to speak about a selection of important aspects or
components of burden:
• The workshop was intended to focus on nonfederal users of ACS data, and
so no speakers or applications from the federal executive agencies were in-
cluded in the workshop program. Yet a major “burden” associated with
the ACS is that it needs to fill the role of the previous census long-form-sample
data in informing general policy. The committee felt that the U.S. Govern-
ment Accountability Office (GAO) is uniquely positioned to speak to the
application of ACS data to the full sweep of policy decisions and could
also speak to the potential costs and benefits of a voluntary ACS. Ron
145
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146 BENEFITS, BURDENS, AND PROSPECTS OF THE AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY
Fecso summarized GAO perspectives on behalf of himself and GAO se-
nior analyst Kathleen Padulchick (Section 8–A).
• Relatedly, and extending themes raised during the state, local, and tribal
perspectives session (Chapter 5), the committee sought someone to speak
about the challenges of communicating estimates, and uncertainty, to state
and local decision makers. Accordingly, Warren Brown (Cornell Univer-
sity) discussed examples from his time as state demographer in Georgia
(Section 8–B).
• As touched on in the newly swirling legislative discussion of a voluntary
ACS (Section 1–B), the ACS is continually open to criticism along pri-
vacy and confidentiality lines; some questions on the survey—such as the
presence or absence of a flush toilet in the housing unit or what time
each person leaves home for work—are routinely challenged as being in-
trusive or tantamount to identity theft. Hence, the committee asked
Barry Steinhardt (former associate director of the American Civil Lib-
erties Union) for perspectives on how one privacy rights advocate reads
the ACS (Section 8–C).
• Michigan state demographer Kenneth Darga was asked to comment on
the respondent burden issues associated with the ACS—how long it takes to
complete the questionnaire, whether the resulting information and data
justify the “imposition” of the survey on a large annual sample, and—
consistent with the new debate—how response to the ACS might change
if the survey were made voluntary (Section 8–D).
• Finally, the committee asked longtime demographic consultant Stephen
Tordella to play devil’s advocate—to get a sense of and comment on the
general complaints and concerns about the ACS and its content raised by
respondents in the public, and how those complaints are registered with
decision makers (Section 8–E).
At the workshop, each of the speakers gave a short opening statement before
the floor was opened up to discussion; that round of questions and answers is
summarized in Section 8–F.
This chapter is also an appropriate point to summarize the brief period of
closing discussion for the workshop. The workshop steering committee invited
Steve Murdock (Rice University)—former director of the U.S. Census Bureau
and former Texas state demographer—to wrap up the workshop with brief re-
marks on what he heard at the workshop and on the prospects of the ACS. This
discussion is summarized in Section 8–G.
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THE BURDENS OF THE ACS, AND CLOSING DISCUSSION 147
8–A MAINTAINING RELIABLE INFORMATION FOR POLICY
ASSESSMENTS
Ron Fecso (U.S. Government Accountability Office [GAO], on behalf of
himself and Kathleen Padulchick) began with a short introduction of GAO’s
role as an investigative arm of the legislative branch. Formerly known as the
General Accounting Office, GAO’s name was changed about 10 years ago to
reflect that the core of its work had changed from primarily auditing programs
to evaluating them, across many dimensions. Most of GAO’s studies are done
at the request of Congress—often 800 or more jobs a year, but Fecso said that
the office is also uniquely positioned to occasionally scan the environment and
inform Congress of developments and trends that it should know about—“and
the ACS, believe me, is one where we try to get their ear as often as we can.”
Fecso reiterated that the basic goal of GAO is to provide Congress with in-
formation that is “objective, fact-based, non-partisan”—“totally nonpolitical”—
and that, as a result, GAO is extremely serious about the quality of the data that
it uses in its reports. Though it most often relies on already available data, GAO
will occasionally conduct its own data collections as studies warrant, including
surveys of local governments and school systems, but it is not equipped for do-
ing big population surveys. Fecso said that GAO makes a point of conducting
a data reliability assessment on data sources available to it, be they public- or
private-sector-generated sources, and that this assessment includes such factors
as the competence of the source, the reasonableness of the resulting estimates,
and the soundness of the methodology. If the data do not meet GAO’s stan-
dards, “we cannot use them.”
One concern as the ACS was launched was whether the estimates from the
survey could satisfy all the functions and demands then placed on estimates from
decennial census long-form samples. Fecso said that the breadth of applications
to which GAO has used the ACS (after satisfying itself of the ACS’s fitness to the
task) testifies to the fact that the ACS has proven itself a desirable replacement.
Some of these wide-ranging applications of the ACS in GAO studies (with their
GAO report number, to facilitate easy reference to the studies at http://www.
gao.gov) are:
• Study of veterans’ housing characteristics and the affordability of rental
housing among low-income veterans (GAO-07-1012); ACS data revealed
a surprisingly large group of veteran renter households with low incomes
(about 2.3 million) but ultimately suggested that—at the time—veterans
were not significantly different from nonveteran renter households in hav-
ing problems affording housing.
• Study of differences in educational attainment and income among detailed
Asian and Pacific Islander demographic subgroups (GAO-07-925); ACS
data suggested, for instance, higher propensity for Asian Indians and Chi-
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148 BENEFITS, BURDENS, AND PROSPECTS OF THE AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY
nese persons in the United States to hold college degrees than other sub-
groups like Vietnamese and Native Hawaiians.
• Evaluation of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) and the pos-
sible financial impact of changes in policy and premium rates (GAO-09-
20); in this case, ACS data on such variables as median household income
and median value of owner-occupied homes were used to target a sample
of counties for intensive case-study analysis—somewhat similar to AIR
Worldwide’s use of ACS data to characterize areas and properties at risk
of catastrophes (see Section 6–E).
• Comparison of alternative methodologies for allocating grant monies for
vocational rehabilitation programs across the states (GAO-09-798); the
ACS data proved ideal for the analysis not only for its detailed informa-
tion on a wide variety of disabilities—disability rates being a key factor in
the need for vocational rehabilitation programs—but also its coverage of
the nonhousehold “group quarters” population, including people living
in group homes or specific rehabilitation facilities.
• Assessment of the possible relationship between limited English profi-
ciency and financial literacy, or awareness of consumer finance issues
(GAO-10-518); while the study required external data (besides the ACS)
for the financial literacy component, GAO appreciated that the multiple
questions on the ACS gave it great flexibility in defining and construct-
ing its own standard definitions of “limited English proficiency” for small
areas.
• Description of the characteristics of women in managerial positions in the
workplace (GAO-10-892R); in a 2010 update of a report originally done in
2001 using Current Population Survey (CPS) data, GAO was able to use
ACS data to examine pay and demographic differences between women
and men in management positions—for a wider range of industries than
was possible with the CPS data.
• Profiling the demographic and economic characteristics of one extremely
specific industry, people working in early child care and education (GAO-
12-248); among the interesting findings, about 93 percent of the workers
in this field who have a bachelor’s degree do not have a degree specifically
in early childhood education.
Fecso noted that GAO has occasionally been called upon to examine and
advise upon technical aspects of the ACS. GAO’s legal staff was asked by Mem-
bers of Congress to render an opinion on the legal justification for the ACS, and
their resulting memo (GAO report B-289852) is still an important part of the
ongoing voluntary-versus-mandatory-response debate because GAO concurred
that the Census Bureau has the legal authority to make the ACS mandatory. In
2002, GAO’s The American Community Survey: Accuracy and Timeliness Issues
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THE BURDENS OF THE ACS, AND CLOSING DISCUSSION 149
(GAO-02-956R) forecast the decline in response rate—and with it the decline in
accuracy—that could accompany a switch from mandatory to voluntary ACS
collection. Most recently, earlier in 2012, GAO issued a report looking at the
whole portfolio of federal household surveys and the role of the ACS, making
the case that the ACS was successfully able to add a question on field of degree
that permits the ACS to serve as the sampling basis for the National Science
Foundation’s National Survey of College Graduates but that—large though it
is—the ACS’s current sample size is too small for it to be piggybacked upon for
other follow-up survey designs.
Fecso closed by offering brief comments on general ACS issues. He re-
iterated his, and GAO’s, concern that a switch to voluntary collection could
degrade the quality of the ACS estimates. Additional funding—and additional
sample units—could get around the basic problem of a lower initial sample size,
but he said that he would still be very worried about the biases that might be
introduced by nonresponse. He acknowledged that the ACS does genuinely in-
cur burdens as well as benefits—it can be a lengthy questionnaire to complete,
and it can be a challenge to communicate. That said, he expressed hope that
communication and education could provide reassurance to ACS respondents,
first that only a very small percentage of the population receives the survey and,
second, that completing the survey is positive civic participation (rather than
rote civic duty). He said that he appreciates the privacy and confidentiality con-
cerns associated with the survey, and the arguments about the questions being
overly intrusive, but—in his assessment—the wealth of information that those
seemingly invasive questions can provide outweighs the burden. To that extent,
he said (similar to Terri Ann Lowenthal’s discussion in Section 7–D) that con-
crete, accessible examples of ACS like those at the workshop should really be
developed and spread around to bolster the case for the survey.
8–B TRADEOFFS: USING A FEDERAL SURVEY TO DRIVE STATE
AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT DECISIONS
Warren Brown (Cornell University) began his remarks by commenting that
a frequently raised argument in favor of the ACS—not one dwelt upon at all
in this workshop, but invoked in other settings—is that it is essential to the
federal government and specifically to the distribution of more than $450 bil-
lion of federal funds. Important—and true—though this might be, Brown
said that he recognized that this argument is not very persuasive in some cir-
cles: There are those “who would like to kill the beast” altogether and feel
strongly that such large sums should not be collected and redistributed in the
first place. That said, he argued, there is a legitimate question underlying this
counterargument—what are the proper roles of and relationships between fed-
eral and state governments?—in light of which it is useful to consider the role
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150 BENEFITS, BURDENS, AND PROSPECTS OF THE AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY
of federally collected data like the ACS. “Even if we went back to the Arti-
cles of Confederation”—weak federal government and strong state and local
governments—Brown argued that it would still be incumbent on the state and
local governments to provide some services to their populations; would it or
would it not be short-sighted to shun a federally collected data collection that
provides detailed information on all states and localities?
Brown continued that he wanted to use his time to talk about the uses
of ACS data by state and local governments in addressing the needs of their
residents—and, in that light, the burdens that the ACS in its present form cre-
ates for state and local users. He said that the basic point he wanted to express is
that the ACS creates tradeoffs for users—fix or relieve one burden, create or ex-
acerbate another—and he said that he would briefly illustrate his point through
an example of work done with the Georgia Division of Aging Services, during
his 3-year period at the University of Georgia as state demographer.
Over his 35-year career, Brown said that his role has been to serve as a “data
intermediary”—making the data from statistical agencies more useful to ana-
lysts, policy makers, and general staff members of state and local governments.
In that capacity, he said that he has heard—extensively—-complaints about the
inadequacies and burdens of government statistics. In the days of the decennial
census long-form sample, the recurring complaint was that the data are so out
of date as to be useless. When the ACS came online, the complaints changed
dramatically. Some challenged the sheer volume of the data and found it to
be almost too timely—the thrust of the complaint being that “this flow of in-
formation is overwhelming.” Others found more subtle, technical grounds for
complaints; officials from small-population areas with significant group quarters
populations (e.g., prisons, college dormitories, nursing homes) critiqued the “er-
ratic and inaccurate” nature of the ACS group quarters data.1 Significantly, state
and local government users also complained about the burdens of interpreting
multiyear period estimates relative to the point-in-time estimates of the old long
form and of grappling with more prominent margins of error; so many state and
local programs have specific cutoffs or thresholds that estimates that look like
they are bouncing above and below those thresholds are highly disconcerting.
With that as context, he moved to the example. The Georgia Division of
Aging Services administers a variety of programs to deliver services to the el-
derly, to persons with disabilities, and specifically to military veterans with
disabilities—the central objective of which is to enable people who wish to re-
main in their own homes (without having to be institutionalized) to do so. Con-
sequently, the division has to coordinate extensively with a variety of service
providers, to streamline delivery approaches so that the maximum of services
1 To that end, Brown held up a copy of—and commended—the recent National Research Coun-
cil (2012) report on measuring the group quarters population in the ACS for offering recommenda-
tions on resolving these problems.
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THE BURDENS OF THE ACS, AND CLOSING DISCUSSION 151
a
Figure 8-1 Veterans by service-connected disability rating, Georgia,
2008–2010
SOURCE: American Community Survey, 2008–2010, Table B21100; adapted from workshop
presentation by Warren Brown.
can be provided with a minimum of cost—“a laudable goal,” Brown said, and
undoubtedly one that is replicated by similar agencies in other states as well.
When the Division of Aging Services came to him with a problem, Brown
emphasized that they did so with tabulations in hand: “They used data from
the American Community Survey; I didn’t bring this data to them,” or have to
bring it to them. The heart of the problem is that one specific question on the
ACS makes it, seemingly, ideal for the division’s purposes. The U.S. Depart-
ment of Veterans Affairs assigns service-connected disability ratings—expressed
as a percentage in the sequence 0, 10, 20, through 100 percent—to affected vet-
erans, and the ACS asks about those disability ratings.2 To their thinking, the
division hoped that the ACS would be able to provide them “statistically reli-
able information to provide more accurate assessments,” Brown said; it seemed
as though the ACS would be a very valuable tool in generating regional esti-
mates of current and anticipated demand for services specifically aimed at vet-
erans with disabilities. Indeed, Brown said, the division had used the ACS to
explore the age of veterans, their living conditions, and their military service—
all information collected in the ACS.
Figure 8-1 displays the estimates—and the upper and lower confidence limits
2 Person Question 28a on the 2012 questionnaire asks “Does this person have a VA service-
connected disability rating?” If the answer is “Yes (such as 0%, 10%, 20%, . . . , 100%),” then the
respondent is asked to report the rating using the five categories implied in Figures 8-1 and 8-2: “0
percent,” “10 or 20 percent,” “30 or 40 percent,” “50 or 60 percent,” or “70 percent or higher.”
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152 BENEFITS, BURDENS, AND PROSPECTS OF THE AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY
on those estimates, shown as red bars—for the service-connected disability rat-
ing question, based on 3-year ACS data (2008–2010) for the state of Georgia as a
whole. The confidence bands are quite tight—“but we don’t deliver the program
at the state level.” Instead, the program for outreach to veterans with disabilities
is administered through regional offices for the aging, so there is a need to drill
down to finer levels of geography.
The top graph in Figure 8-2 shows the same service-connected disability es-
timates (again from 2008–2010 ACS data) for the largest geographic subpopu-
lation in the state: the Atlanta metropolitan area, in which over half of Geor-
gia’s total population resides. Looking at the graph, Brown said, “you can do
some program planning at that level”—“the confidence limits are still pretty ac-
ceptable,” and there is still some clear separation in group sizes between the
extremes of disability rating groups. But the bottom graph shows the results
for the Macon metropolitan area—“not a small population,” at around 250,000
total population, roughly 17,5000 veterans in total, and about 2,300 of those
having a service-connected disability rating. And, there, the division came to
Brown, wondering what to do. The confidence limits widen a great deal and,
from this picture, Brown said that “it is difficult to justify how many persons in
need” of the veteran-specific services are in the Macon area. Yet “this is the only
information they have, to set those kinds of planning objectives.”
Brown closed by arguing that what is needed for effective programming in
state and local government programs is “reliable, consistent, accurate, precise
estimates, as best we can get them.” Brown said that the example of the disabled
veterans brings home to him that the ACS creates, and will continue to create,
tradeoffs. Making responses voluntary might benefit the privacy of individual
responses, but the resulting diminution of the sample size could hurt the accu-
racy of estimates. Brown said that his worry is that these shifts in quality might
disproportionately “create tangible negative consequences for some of our most
vulnerable residents: youth, the elderly, and disabled veterans.”
8–C INTRUSIVENESS AND PRIVACY CONCERNS
Barry Steinhardt (Friends of Privacy USA) opened his comments with an
important disclaimer; some people in the workshop know him from his lengthy
career with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and, in particular,
from his service as ACLU’s representative to the Census Advisory Commit-
tee. However, he emphasized that he does not represent or speak for the ACLU
today. What he said he does speak from is the perspective of a long-time ob-
server of the intersection between the census and privacy and confidentiality
issues—in which capacity he asked to start by stating his “incredible respect” for
the Census Bureau’s privacy safeguards. In his assessment, the Census Bureau
is the federal government agency with the most effective program for “protect-
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THE BURDENS OF THE ACS, AND CLOSING DISCUSSION 153
Atlanta, Georgia
a
Macon, Georgia
a
Figure 8-2 Veterans by service-connected disability rating, Atlanta and
Macon, Georgia, metropolitan areas, 2008–2010
SOURCE: American Community Survey, 2008–2010, Table B21100; adapted from workshop
presentation by Warren Brown.
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154 BENEFITS, BURDENS, AND PROSPECTS OF THE AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY
ing the privacy of the respondents and the integrity and the privacy of the data
that it receives.” Steinhardt added that he currently sits on the Privacy Advi-
sory Committee of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and that
“they largely roll their eyes when I set the Census Bureau as a model” for DHS
to follow; still, he finds the contrast between the Census Bureau and DHS in
terms of privacy protection to be remarkable.
Steinhardt also stated his conclusion that “it is very difficult and nearly im-
possible to glean personally identifiable information from aggregated census
data,” in large part because of the Census Bureau’s well-developed techniques
(including data swapping) for minimizing identifiable information. He knows
of no example since World War II—the “infamous example” of disclosure of
information involving Japanese Americans—of the Census Bureau willfully or
inadvertently releasing personally identifiable information about an individual,
which is an extremely commendable effort. Steinhardt did note that one might
not be able to identify particular individuals in aggregate census data but one
can tell when there are some outliers—far different in some characteristic than
the norm, within some fairly discrete answer. How much information one can
glean from outliers and whether marketers and others in the for-profit sector
make use of them are open and interesting questions, Steinhardt observed.
With that said, and recognizing the many “extraordinarily valuable role[s]”
played by the ACS, as illustrated by the presentations at the workshop,
Steinhardt said that it has to be recognized that some of the questions on the
ACS involve personally sensitive information. Moreover, many of the ACS
questions are inherently highly personal in nature—Steinhardt said that there is
“no other way to get the value out of the ACS without asking those questions,”
using the personal answers to produce estimates at aggregate levels.
So, getting to the way in which a privacy rights advocate reads the ACS,
Steinhardt said that the first natural question is how well the Census Bureau
protects the data. As he said before, “the answer is ‘very well’ ”—the Census
Bureau has a “sterling record of protecting the data.” He recalled—from his
tenure at the ACLU—actively urging people to fill out the decennial census form
and the ACS questionnaire, saying that they could do so “with great confidence
that their data would be protected.” So, on that level, the ACS is not troubling.
However, the question of whether responses to the ACS should be voluntary
or mandatory is another matter. Steinhardt said that, in his opinion, “it is a close
constitutional question” as to whether the Census Bureau can compel responses
to all of the questions on the ACS. To be clear, he continued, “I am hardly
a constitutional originalist on this”—census practices have had to change, and
have changed, since ratification of the Constitution and the conduct of the 1790
census, and he does not want to try to parse exactly what the founders could
have possibly envisioned regarding the census. Moreover, there is “certainly a
whole range of questions which I believe people have a constitutional obligation
to answer.” But, he suggested, “I think it is a stretch” to argue that questions of
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THE BURDENS OF THE ACS, AND CLOSING DISCUSSION 155
“whether or not you heat your home with natural gas” and whether that natural
gas is in a bottle or comes through a pipe3 flow directly from the constitutional
mandate to apportion the Congress.
In the voluntary-versus-mandatory debate, Steinhardt observed, it is fre-
quently mentioned that the Census Bureau has never prosecuted anyone for
failure to answer the questions. In the cases that he is aware of, where litigants
have challenged the penalties for nonresponse, Steinhardt said that the courts
have uniformly declined to hear the question; because the Census Bureau has
not brought charges against anyone, the litigants have “no credible fear of pros-
ecution” and so the courts rule that they lack standing to bring the case. In his
opinion, Steinhardt said that he thinks “the courts are wrong in that,” and that
actual judicial examination of the issues would be very interesting—and “an ex-
traordinarily close question about whether or not you can be required to answer
all the questions.”
Concluding his remarks, Steinhardt said that “if you ask me as a privacy
advocate what I worry about,” the mandatory-versus-voluntary issue is not at
the top of the list. Again commending the Census Bureau’s “sterling record” in
resisting such entreaties, Steinhardt argued that a breach in the Census Bureau’s
protections and the misuse of census or ACS data by other elements in the fed-
eral government would be vastly more damaging to the enterprise of the ACS.
He said that he appreciated hearing about the manifold uses of the ACS, that he
thinks that the ACS plays an extremely valuable role, and that Congress should
continue to support the ACS. He is, however, firm in his conclusion that the
question of whether all of the ACS questions should be mandatory responses is
a close constitutional question.
8–D IDENTIFYING (AND REDUCING) RESPONDENT BURDEN
The Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 requires federal agencies like the
Census Bureau to submit proposed “information collections”—essentially, any
gathering of information from 10 or more respondents—to the U.S. Office of
Management and Budget (OMB) for clearance, at least once every 3 years for
an ongoing survey like the ACS. OMB, in turn, is asked to weigh—among
other things—whether the demands that the collection puts on respondents’
time are appropriate (and reduced to the extent possible). In its most recent
request for clearance of the ACS (viewable by searching for Information Collec-
tion Review 201202-0607-003 on http://www.reginfo.gov), the Census Bureau
estimated that the standard ACS housing unit questionnaire takes about 40 min-
utes to complete on the mailed paper form and about 27 minutes administered
3 Housing Question 10 on the 2012 ACS questionnaires asks “Which FUEL is used MOST for
heating this house, apartment, or mobile home?” The first two response categories, out of nine, are
“Gas: from underground pipes serving the neighborhood” and “Gas: bottled, tank, or LP.”
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156 BENEFITS, BURDENS, AND PROSPECTS OF THE AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY
by phone or personal interview. (The actual time to complete the survey de-
pends critically on the number of people in the household—and, with it, the
number of person-level questions that must be answered.) Based on these as-
sumptions, and including quality control interview and data collection from
group quarters as well as households, the Census Bureau said that it anticipates
the average annual respondent burden for 2012–2015 to be roughly 2,435,568
hours across 3,805,200 respondents—a large commitment of time and resources
that invites continued and active discussion to keep that burden in check.
Asked to comment specifically on issues of respondent burden, Kenneth
Darga (Michigan state demographer) framed the problem by noting that true
respondent burden includes at least two major components: demands that
the survey puts on respondents’ time and effort (as described above) and the
cost/burden of revealing personal information. He said that his comments
are intended to place these components into context through comparison with
other demands for time and effort and with disclosure of personal information.
He first asked the workshop audience to consider that various levels of
government—federal, state, local—place myriad demands on individuals’ time
and effort (not to mention, in some cases, their money). Among these, the
federal government demands compulsory military registration (and, in some
wartime periods, compulsory service); it also directs that individuals wait in
line for Transportation Security Administration screening in order to travel by
air. Depending on the letter of the law in individual states, state government
makes a strong, mandatory claim on young peoples’ time: mandatory school
attendance from anywhere from 10 to 14 years. And state and local govern-
ments both demand that people wait at traffic lights, and that they keep their
lawn mowed and their sidewalks clear of snow in winter.
Against this backdrop, Darga argued, is the particular demand by the federal
government to complete the ACS questionnaire—a demand, roughly speaking,
that is made of a specified household “about once every 45 years.” As has been
said of the ACS, Darga commented that it is conceptually possible to make any
of the other demands that he listed voluntary rather than mandatory—but, as
Brown had suggested in his remarks, there are tradeoffs. If waiting at traffic
lights were made voluntary, it could appear on the surface like giving people a
freedom that they did not have before—yet, at the same time, Darga said that
the move would work to take away or impair the special freedom of being able
to drive safely. Likewise, as others have argued, it might appear that making the
ACS voluntary would free up individuals’ time, but it could introduce major
costs in impeding good and relatively unbiased data. Darga reasoned that the
ACS is the least of the demands that he listed, especially amortized over a 45-year
period, but that the fundamental problem is that the ACS is a little-understood
(and hence much-resented) demand; people instinctively understand why they
have to stop at traffic lights or mow their lawns, but the reasons for completing
the ACS questionnaire are less clear.
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THE BURDENS OF THE ACS, AND CLOSING DISCUSSION 157
Darga added that, to be sure, the actual time and effort needed to complete
the ACS varies considerably across households. Most fundamentally, most of
the questions on the ACS are asked about each individual in the household;
larger households necessarily require longer times to complete the question-
naire. Other factors that can inflate the time needed to complete the ACS
questionnaire—in essence, Darga completed his analogy, mowing the lawn sev-
eral times rather than just once—include language barriers and literacy issues.
He said that he would shortly offer some suggestions for reducing this burden
but that, in his mind, the relevant question is, essentially: Is completing the ACS
as important as spending the same number (or more) minutes cutting grass, wait-
ing at traffic lights, or—generally—doing any of the large number of other things
that various governments require us to do for the public good?
Turning to the second broad component of burden, Darga echoed
Steinhardt’s conclusion that—for some people—some of the information called
for by the ACS questionnaire can be sensitive. Someone’s actual level of edu-
cational attainment might be less than most people think it is; racial or ethnic
background might be a deep family secret; in some contexts, and in a climate
of concern about identity theft or government intrusiveness, even the basic
data item of a person’s name might be deemed sensitive. On this point, Darga
said that it is impossible for the Census Bureau to fully anticipate which data
items might be deemed sensitive by which particular individuals, so its only
natural response—a commendable one—is to zealously guard all personal data
as confidential. Continuing, Darga suggested an important contrast with other
demands for personal information: “when the [Internal Revenue Service] or
an insurance company or a police officer wants information about you it is
generally because they want to make some sort of decision about you.” But
the Census Bureau is fundamentally different in that what it really wants is
aggregate information, not personal information—the catch being that it is not
possible to arrive at those aggregate data without asking respondents inherently
personal questions and then adding the responses together.
Under the broad heading of disclosing personal information, Darga said that
he wanted to make two other points (and draw two additional contrasts be-
tween the ACS and other situations). One is that it should be acknowledged that
some (but definitely not all) of the information requested by the ACS is already
known and disclosed to many individuals and organizations. Tax records, em-
ployer files, driver records, local assessor records, conversation with neighbors,
and so forth—Darga said that if the FBI or some other entity wants specific in-
formation about a particular person, they can get it from these kinds of sources.
But the contrast with the ACS is important to bear in mind. These other data
sources are well suited to the revelation of personal information but not pro-
ducing the aggregate characteristics of an entity like a census tract, which is the
ACS’s strength. Another point is that information about specific individuals is
not available from the ACS—and, arguably, would not be very useful if it were.
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158 BENEFITS, BURDENS, AND PROSPECTS OF THE AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY
Using himself as an example, Darga said that “anyone who wants information
about me can forget about getting it from the ACS,” for two basic reasons:
• Procedurally, the confidentiality safeguards lauded by Steinhardt prevent
browsing or look-up of individual information for purposes other than
compiling statistics or evaluating the survey, and
• Logically, one could not possibly find information about Darga from the
ACS for the simple reason that “my household has not gotten an ACS
form yet”—the same statement that could be made by the vast majority of
persons and households in the country.
Put more succinctly, Darga said that “if Big Brother wants information about
me, he does not really need the ACS”—“his best bet is the Internet.”
Darga concluded by offering four specific suggestions that could be consid-
ered for reducing respondent burden and alleviating privacy concerns:
• Improve the layout of the ACS questionnaire to make it easier and quicker
to report information for large families: Darga observed that the current
ACS questionnaire can seem intimidatingly long but that a major reason
for that is cosmetic in nature—the same core of questions is repeated five
times, for each member of the family. So, he said, the person respond-
ing for a large family “needs to read through four pages of questions five
separate times”—frustrating for many people, and actually difficult to do
in households where language or literacy concerns exist. Darga suggested
that strategies for developing and deploying a large-family form—a colum-
nar format where each question would only have to be read once and then
answers for each person made across a row—could shorten the form and
make it less imposing.
• Make better provisions for complex households: For living situations like co-
op student housing or group homes, the ACS data collection task is one of
collecting all the information of households of many unrelated residents—
and, Darga said, it is tough to envision or rely on a “house secretary who is
going to take responsibility for answering the ACS” on behalf of 20 unre-
lated residents. In these kinds of households, the Census Bureau’s effective
“all-or-nothing” approach to collection—assuming that the response will
be automatically coordinated for everyone in the household—may not be
effective. It might be worth considering asking the lead respondent to
make the roster of people in the household but to permit checkboxes to
be filled for people (or subhouseholds) where the Census Bureau would
be better off making a separate contact (by mail or phone). This kind
of approach could prove helpful in settings where people do not want to
disclose personal information to a housemate or where some household
members are unavailable when the (single) form is being filled out.
• Suggest an alternative for people who do not want to provide their legal
names: Darga said that simply reporting one’s name can take respondents
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THE BURDENS OF THE ACS, AND CLOSING DISCUSSION 159
aback; they might fear identity theft, they might fear exposure of immi-
gration status, or—for other reasons—they might not want to give their
name to a government agency for any other purpose. So, he reasoned,
one possible fix would be to take the person’s name out of the equation.
Structurally, Darga said that the primary roles played by person name
in the current ACS are to simply “keep people straight while answering
the questions” (e.g., to ensure that “Person 3” is actually the same person
through the whole questionnaire), and to help follow-up workers clarify
missing or contradictory information. It may be feasible to achieve both
of those objectives by allowing respondents to use or claim a nickname
or an alias; Darga added that deemphasizing the need for reporting names
could help the Census Bureau make clear its interest in aggregate informa-
tion rather than “building a master database of personal information on
individuals.”
• Consider the use of an incentive to help reverse attitudes toward partici-
pating in the ACS: Acknowledging that “it is probably not feasible to
include a cash incentive payment in the Census Bureau’s budget” for
the ACS, Darga suggested “many politicians—and taxpayers—do like tax
cuts.” Darga suggested that some small tax credit for people who have
submitted a complete ACS form could be a reasonable way to offset a
sample household’s time and effort in completing the survey. Indeed,
he remarked, “we might even start to see people complaining that they
haven’t received an ACS form instead of complaining that they have.”
8–E RESPONDENT COMPLAINTS AND CONGRESSIONAL
REACTION
Acknowledging that he had been asked by the workshop planners to serve
as a sort of “designated complainer,” Stephen Tordella (Decision Demographics,
Inc.) opened his remarks by stating that “the ACS really is a burden; there
is no way of getting around that.” But, he continued, his remarks are meant to
underscore two basic points, the first being that the “burden” of the ACS is—and
should be—-partially borne by Congress, one of the survey’s most important
stakeholders. As to the second, he recalled that he used to work for a sales-
driven organization, in which the constant mantra was “nothing happens until
somebody makes a sale.” Tordella said that it is equally true that, for the census
and the ACS, “nothing happens until people send in their responses.” Hence, his
second major point—that respondents should be viewed as “the most valuable
commodity we have”—“they should be revered and treasured, not threatened,”
and they deserve more prominence in census and ACS operations.
First, specific to the burden argument, Tordella said that he had talked to a
lot of people in the weeks before the workshop, to get their reactions to some of
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160 BENEFITS, BURDENS, AND PROSPECTS OF THE AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY
the ACS questions. From those conversations, Tordella concluded that the data
and the underlying estimates are certainly important but that even the advocates
of the estimates have to concede that there is something ridiculous, something
odd about asking people “when they left the house that morning or whether
they have toilets.” He said that his own wife’s reactions—the morning of the
workshop, previewing his comments—were telling. Asking her whether she
knew about the question about toilets, she shrugged, and admitted that she did
not understand why the Census Bureau would be asking about toilets. He fol-
lowed up: “How about if somebody asked you what time you left the house this
morning?” His wife’s immediate response was that the question “seemed kind
of creepy,” and Tordella suggested that “there is no way that it will ever not seem
creepy to some group of people.”
No one knows the real number of complaints lodged against the ACS,
Tordella said—certainly not the congressional staff members he talked to about
the ACS. The Census Bureau “has a little better idea,” keeping a record of
correspondence that they receive, but even that misses the silent complaints—
questionnaires not filed out of anger or aggravation. Still, he suggested that the
correspondence suggests some of the flavor and the magnitude of complaints
about the survey—even if 1 in 1,000 people complain, 1 out of 1,000 of the
roughly 3 million households reached by the ACS each year, “that is still 3,000
complaints,” from which insight can be gleaned.
From his interactions with Census Bureau staff, Tordella said that he re-
ceived information about some broad categories of reactions to the ACS. The
most voluminous of the complaints are those objecting to the perception of in-
trusive and invasive questions. He quoted from some of these complaints:
• “This is a lengthy questionnaire that asks very personal questions that are
frankly no one’s business.”
• “Why would you ask, or need to know, what time I leave for work each
day, and how long it takes me to get to work? Nor do I understand what
my monthly bills have to do with it?”
• “I find this survey very invasive and really none of the Bureau’s business.”
A second broad category of complaints comes from people who did not return
the mailed questionnaire, and so complain about the telephone and field visit
follow-up steps. Again, Tordella recited some quotes from the correspondence
to the Census Bureau:
• “I spoke with a Census rep last month and since then I have been getting
five to ten calls a day from random people claiming to be employees of
Census.”
• “I called the number for assistance [and] was horrified at the rude and in-
sulting and harassing and threatening language used by the person suppos-
edly there to provide assistance. Naturally, this made me more suspicious
of the survey of its intended purpose.”
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THE BURDENS OF THE ACS, AND CLOSING DISCUSSION 161
• “A worker came to my home and she was very hostile. She said that it
was mandatory that we fill out the Census. We told her we already did
the Census. She said we had to fill it out. We told her that we were under
the impression that the Census was voluntary. She went on to say that
there was personal information that was needed. We did report her to our
local police department.”
Following the theme of the last quote, the next set of complaints concerns the
mandatory nature of response:
• “In which country am I living [if this is mandatory]?”
• “I am only responding so I do not have to pay a fine—but I am EX-
TREMELY uncomfortable about providing this information” (Tordella
emphasized that “extremely” was written in all-capitals).
• “Being forced to complete a survey like this gives me the feeling of being a
disenfranchised federal tax-paying citizen with no option but to shut up,
fill out the survey used to distribute money that we don’t have, and pay
higher taxes.”
Other complaints are fewer in number but can be particularly vocal and passion-
ate. Tordella said that worries about whether the ACS questionnaire is really a
scam seem to be particularly acute among the elderly and infirm; their surro-
gates or caretakers will make appeals and inquiries raising that concern. Other
complaints question the constitutionality of the ACS and the degree of overlap
between the ACS and other agencies’ data sources. He closed the recitation of
common complaints by reading a longer quote from one letter:
I find this American Community Survey to be appalling, invasive, and in-
trusive, and none of the government’s business and I intend to let my sena-
tors and congressmen know how I feel. Take note of that.
And, Tordella concluded, “a good number of them do.” Even if it is 1 in
1,000, “these are legitimate and heartfelt beliefs,” and that is the backdrop
against which the ACS must operate. He said that these kinds of complaints
are never going to go away completely—but neither are they a completely new
phenomenon. He recalled being interviewed on Wisconsin Public Radio during
the preparations for the 1980 census; reviewing some of the reported complaints
about the ACS brought back memories of that day in Wisconsin because many
of the same issues and claims of harassment by the census were raised then.
The dots are not hard to connect concerning the way these kinds of ACS
complaints register on Capitol Hill, Tordella said. Congress is necessarily “part
of the complaint bureau for the ACS”—their staff members field these kind of
complaints and the ACS, being in continuous operation, spurs such complaints
every week of the year—“and Congress controls your budget.” To be sure, he
added, Congress is a diverse body just as the American public is diverse, and
so contains a range of views on the role of the government in the census and
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162 BENEFITS, BURDENS, AND PROSPECTS OF THE AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY
ACS. Tordella noted his sincere personal belief that “there should be some peo-
ple in Congress who hate the census and everything it is about—just to keep the
Census Bureau on its toes.” But there are many other members of Congress for
whom the ACS only exists—to the extent that they recognize it—as a source of
“continual pain,” the source of those complaints from constituents.
From his conversations with congressional staff members, Tordella said that
he concluded that there is a feeling out there that the Census Bureau is doing lit-
tle to alleviate the perception problems with the ACS. “Press these congressional
staffers about the idea of a voluntary ACS and the cost and quality implications,
and their response is, ‘You fix it.’ ” Use cost savings from Internet data collec-
tion, or work out some new methodology, but “just go and fix it.”
With that in mind, Tordella suggested that one possible solution—or at least
“a place to start”—would be for the Census Bureau to recognize that “respon-
dents really should be king.” Newspapers have ombudsmen to take readers’
perspectives in mind and challenge editorial approaches—Tordella asked “why
shouldn’t the respondent have an ombudsman” appointed at the Census Bu-
reau? There are mechanisms within the Census Bureau that serve to protect
respondents’ rights—a chief privacy officer and a Disclosure Review Board, for
instance—but those are little understood (or appreciated) by the public. A
highly visible ombudsman and a citizen’s advisory panel, “where people feel
like they can be heard,” could go a long way to improving perceptions of the
ACS.
Tordella then briefly displayed some recent screenshots of the Census Bu-
reau’s homepage to suggest that “there should really be a lot made on the web-
site about respondents.” On the particular day he visited the site, one of the
four “top stories” on a few-seconds rotation at the top of the page actually did
speak to respondents: “Your Response Makes a Difference for Small Businesses”
read the headline, above a link to more information about the 2012 Economic
Census. That is good, but seemingly a one-shot deal—if you have received a
questionnaire from the ACS or some other survey you have to scroll all the
way to the bottom of the page and find, in small type, the link “Are You in
a Survey?” in order to start having your questions answered. He argued that
the placement of the link has probably been tested in some way—“Census tests
most things”—but he concluded that it ought to be much easier for respondents
to find supporting information, to find justification for the questions they are
being asked, and to feel as though their concerns are heard.
He closed by nothing that these kinds of “respondent relations” steps might
not alleviate all of the complaints, but that the Census Bureau could still ben-
efit from them—and learn from the examples of other agencies. Arguably, he
said, the federal agency “that has the most teeth and the most penalties and the
most influence over the American people” is the Internal Revenue Service (IRS),
which went through a substantial modernization in the 1990s. That moderniza-
tion succeeded, he said, not solely through upgrades in information technology,
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THE BURDENS OF THE ACS, AND CLOSING DISCUSSION 163
but also through concerted attention to taxpayer needs and concerns. These
days, “even the IRS is kinder and gentler”—surely, he said, there must be ways
for the Census Bureau to be kinder and gentler as well.
8–F DISCUSSION
In the general discussion session following the speakers’ opening statements,
Darga’s suggestion of finding some way to incentivize ACS response drew a
variety of reactions. Patrick Jankowski (Greater Houston Partnership) asked
other session speakers to comment on that specific proposal, and Fecso said
that he worried about the idea “snowballing to all the other federal surveys”—
ultimately, the financial costs of the incentive might outweigh “what you are
getting out” of the incentives in terms of good response. Recalling his immer-
sion in the complaints expressed about the ACS, Tordella replied that people
might look at an incentive program and ask “why are we giving away more tax
dollars for nothing?”—an incentive might boost response, but it could also cre-
ate more hard-set opposition to the survey. Brian Harris-Kojetin (U.S. Office
of Management and Budget) reminded the workshop audience that—just the
week before the workshop—the House of Representatives approved an amend-
ment to an appropriations bill (albeit not the Commerce, Justice, and Science
bill that funds the Census Bureau) prohibiting the use of money as a respondent
incentive in a survey, so the legality of federal survey incentives is a matter of
considerable current debate.4 Dan Weinberg (U.S. Census Bureau) argued that
even the idea of a tax credit, rather than a cash incentive, is infeasible because
the Census Bureau would have to violate its own confidentiality provisions in
order to tell the IRS who had completed the survey; Darga countered that some
kind of stub or “receipt” from the ACS response could be attached with a tax
return if the respondent wanted to claim the credit, but Weinberg argued that
simply confirming a person or household’s inclusion in the ACS could consti-
tute a Title 13 violation.
Alan Zaskavsky (Harvard University) addressed a question to Brown and his
specific example of estimating service-connected disability ratings among veter-
ans (though, he noted, other speakers in the workshop sessions could address
it in their own fields). Would clients or end users like the Division of Aging
Services accept a move to much more model-based estimates? Such estimates
might be smoother and have smaller intervals—at the risk of possibly looking
4 On June 6, 2012, the House voted 355–51 in favor of an amendment to H.R. 5325, the En-
ergy and Water appropriations bill for fiscal year 2013, offered by Rep. Scott Tipton (R-Colorado).
Motivated specifically by $2 and $20 incentives offered in a 1,000-household Bureau of Reclamation
survey on attitudes toward removing dams on the Klamath River, the amendment’s language swept
wider: “None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to conduct a survey in which
money is included or provided for the benefit of the responder.” The whole bill, as amended, was
passed that same day, and awaits consideration in the Senate.
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164 BENEFITS, BURDENS, AND PROSPECTS OF THE AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY
more like a constant rate across the different disability rate categories. Put an-
other way, is the problem for the division that the margins of error are so large
and the intervals so wide, or is it that the statistical evidence does not differ-
entiate much between the categories? Brown indicated that he thought such
model-baed estimates could certainly win acceptance, and could be viewed as
credible compared to estimates with much larger margins of error. Brown said
that his sense is that people generally accept that the highly publicized monthly
unemployment statistics are comprised of model-based estimates.
Terri Ann Lowenthal (Funders Census Initiative and the Census Project)
and Steinhardt engaged in a colloquy over Steinhardt’s assertion that the manda-
tory nature of the ACS is a close constitutional question. Lowenthal said that
she had to “respectfully but firmly disagree” about mandatory response being a
close call; she mentioned discussions in the first Congress about the content of
the 1790 census (asking for more than a simple headcount) and court cases up-
holding the constitutionality of the content on the previous census long form.
In her mind, the constitutionality of mandatory response “seems to be on pretty
solid ground.” Steinhardt replied that there are legal scholars who see the ques-
tion as similarly clear-cut—in the opposite direction. He said that what he finds
significant is that the courts have never really addressed the issue head-on—that
is, dismissing cases for lack of standing is not quite the same as strongly sup-
porting the constitutionality of the survey content. He reiterated his comment
from his opening statement that “the level of detail in the ACS”—down to the
method of delivery of natural gas—“is such that I think it is a close question.”
Lowenthal answered that she saw Steinhardt’s point but sees things in a differ-
ent way. She said that the issue is not really whether the framers could have
possibly envisioned specific questions, but the more general issue of “whether
the government has a right” and the authority “to gather information for the
public good.”
8–G WORKSHOP CLOSING REMARKS, AND DISCUSSION
Asked for his comments on the main topics of the workshop and the
prospects of the ACS—from his perspective as a long-time researcher, as former
Texas demographer, and as former director of the U.S. Census Bureau—Steve
Murdock began with a slight apology for not being able to sit in on more of the
workshop. However, he said, one of the reasons that he could not be present
for longer was a previous speaking engagement for officers of the American As-
sociation for Affirmative Action. When those officers learned where Murdock
was heading next, he said that several asked him to “please let everybody know
how important the ACS is to us—we hear it’s under attack in Congress.”
Murdock said that the ACS is “critical to what the country does for deci-
sion making,” and he commended the workshop speakers for providing very
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THE BURDENS OF THE ACS, AND CLOSING DISCUSSION 165
clear indications of the value of the data in a wide range of applications. He
said that he wanted to make two basic points in his short remarks, the first of
which is that the ACS sample size is unlikely to ever be so large as to completely
mitigate the challenges that confront users of small-area ACS estimates. He de-
scribed preparing a speech in a community of about 25,000 people, and he said
that he commonly prepares standard demographic profiles—from the ACS—for
such speeches, together with his Rice University colleague George Hough. One
of the standard figures that he likes to display is change in poverty rates over
time, by race. In this particular instance, the 1990 and 2000 census data both
showed the percent of Hispanic households in poverty in this community as be-
ing roughly 36 percent; generating the same variable using 2005–2009 ACS data,
the figure was 11 percent. Clearly, something seemed off, and Murdock said that
he decided not to use the city-level figures in his talk—and he did not. But, “sure
enough,” he was challenged during discussion by someone in the audience who
noted that he had shown these data for the nation as a whole, for the state, for
large metropolitan areas, and that he had presented all manner of other data for
the particular community, but not that specific poverty figure. As it turned out,
this particular questioner worked for the local mayor and approached Murdock
after the talk, saying that the local government was currently trying to figure
out how to allocate funds to various community groups—she asked whether
they could cut the distribution to Hispanics in the community because the ACS
shows so many few Hispanics in poverty, and Murdock explained that this prob-
ably was not the case. The questioner replied, “Oh, so you’re saying these data
aren’t really all that good?,” and Murdock tried to explain that the numbers have
to be understood in a broader context.
Murdock explained that he brought up this story because perceptions matter
a great deal; consistent with Tordella’s earlier remarks, Murdock said that it
does not take a majority to create major problems for the ACS—single, vocal
complaints from key stakeholders can do just as much damage.
Acknowledging that it might sound to some “like I’m a traitor to the
cause”—“I am not”—Murdock said that his second main point is that it is pru-
dent for the survey’s stakeholders to give serious thought “about what happens
if our defense of the ACS Alamo doesn’t work.” The history of the battle at
the Alamo suggests that many of the casualties at the fort “died so bravely be-
cause there was no way out.” Murdock emphasized that he “has absolutely no
doubt in the utility of the ACS data”; having led the Bureau, he also has “noth-
ing but complete and total admiration for the Census Bureau staff that does this
work.” Nonetheless, he suggested that stakeholders need to “start talking qui-
etly, constructively,” about viable alternatives and about managing the tradeoffs
that might come through alternative sampling sizes or aggregations of periods
over time. He closed by expressing his hope that this workshop could be fol-
lowed up with one that asks: “What would you do? What can we do? What can
we suggest?” Work should certainly continue to support the current ACS de-
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166 BENEFITS, BURDENS, AND PROSPECTS OF THE AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY
sign, and hopefully it can succeed, but he suggested that, unfortunately, “noble
causes and noble rationales don’t always work politically.”
At the end of Murdock’s remarks, steering committee co-chair Linda Gage
(California Department of Finance, retired) asked whether anyone from the
Census Bureau had any summary comments that they would like to offer. Jim
Treat (chief, American Community Survey Office, U.S. Census Bureau) said
that he came to the workshop with “high expectations of what I was going to
hear,” and that those expectations had been exceeded by all the presentations
and discussions. He said that he and his colleagues have a great deal of infor-
mation to take back—examples of specific data uses to flesh out and emphasize,
challenges in communication to work on—and he thanked the presenters and
participants for their efforts. Constance Citro (Committee on National Statis-
tics) added that the day and a half had been “fantastic,” outlining the breadth and
depth of uses of ACS data—alone and in combination with other data sources—
for a wide range of policy areas. She noted that the workshop would contribute,
in part, to the work of a new National Research Council panel on ACS techni-
cal issues, and credited the Census Bureau with taking a hard, open look at the
whole ACS program and finding ways “where it can be focused, improved, and
made more useful.” Like Murdock, she said that she did “not want to be defeatist
in any way,” but that she agreed that ongoing examination of the ACS demands
serious alternatives—ways to make the ACS “as cost-effective as possible in a
very tough political environment.”
